btop vs FFmpeg

btop is a free resource monitor for Linux and macOS that displays processor, memory, disk, network, and process activity. Its game-inspired menus, mouse support, and responsive interface provide ways to navigate system views and process controls. Users can inspect process details, filter or sort the list, view it as a tree, send signals, or pause the process list. Network graphs scale automatically; other displays cover disk activity and speeds, plus a battery meter. Users can choose graph symbols, create presets, and use theme files shared with bpytop and bashtop or a custom themes directory. GPU monitoring is supported on Linux and on macOS with Apple Silicon GPUs when built with GPU support. NVIDIA monitoring needs the nvidia-ml library, AMD needs rocm_smi_lib, and Intel needs SYSFS read permission. The project documents Linux and macOS installation, package installation for FreeBSD and NetBSD, and Homebrew for macOS and Linux. It recommends a terminal with 24-bit truecolor and wide-character support, a UTF8 locale, and a font covering specified Unicode blocks. The repository lists the Apache-2.0 license.

FFmpeg is free, open-source software for recording, converting, and streaming audio and video on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its command-line tool converts media files between formats, supports local recording, and lists AVI among its output formats. Output protocols include HLS, RTMP, RTMPS, RTP, RTSP, SRT, and UDP. Hardware acceleration is available for encoding and decoding. Decoding support includes Vulkan, VAAPI, and OpenHarmony, and Vulkan codecs can work on implementations of Vulkan 1.3. The Vulkan compute approach supports FFv1 encoding and decoding and ProRes RAW decoding, but only for codecs designed for parallel decoding. FFmpeg’s transcoding components run in parallel, which can improve throughput and CPU use; gains may be limited when one component dominates the processing. The project accepts contributions through its Forgejo instance and offers mailing lists, IRC, forums, bug reports, a wiki, and conferences. Version 8.1 Hoare was announced as available for download on March 16, 2026.