wasm vs flutter

[odaymusic]

I want to know the difference between ffmpeg and wasm or flutter, which is better to use?? And which one provides better performance for users on the site and mobile .. As I understand that wasm made the performance significantly high, but is it more than flutter? Or that ffmpeg with flutter will get better performance?

[HGStyle]

WASM (WebAssembly) and Flutter are two different things.

WebAssembly is a technology mainly used in webbrowsers to run low-level C, C++, Rust, or code written in any other language. Flutter is an SDK for creating cross-platform (ie. same codebase for iOS and Android) mobile applications.

I guess what you wanted to know is:

Is FFMPEG.WASM, a JavaScript library powered by WebAssembly, more performant than flutter_ffmpeg, a Flutter library?

The response is: Probably no. FFMPEG.WASM is probably not as performant as flutter_ffmpeg. While I don't use Flutter, from what I've saw, the flutter_ffmpeg package uses the official FFMPEG library directly with bindings in Flutter, and in your mobile app, Flutter will contain the FFMPEG libraries compiled natively for the target mobile platform (ie. your app will contain the native FFMPEG libraries and will run at native mobile speed). However, I don't think it'll work if you build a website (and not a mobile app) using Flutter.

Meanwhile, FFMPEG.WASM uses the official FFMPEG library inside a "virtual machine" that is called WebAssembly and that allows any low-level libraries like FFMPEG to be used in JavaScript inside your browser. While it might work on mobile without a problem, because WebAssembly is also available on mobile via WebView for example, performance will become an issue: FFMPEG.WASM is slower, firstly, because it doesn't benefit from low-level ARM assembly speedups, but also because, at the end of the day, WebAssembly is still a VM, it will still be slower than a native FFMPEG build. However, in a webbrowser, it is not possible to use anything other than JavaScript and WebAssembly, so FFMPEG.WASM is the best option, but in mobile apps, flutter_ffmpeg, which uses native code will be faster.

In short:

• If you want to build an Android/iOS app with Flutter, build it with flutter_ffmpeg. Using FFMPEG.WASM is possible, but will be slower than using flutter_ffmpeg.
• If you want to build a website/webapp with Flutter, flutter_ffmpeg won't work, as it only targets phones. Here you can use FFMPEG.WASM.
• If you want to build an Android/iOS app that can also run in a webbrowser, you have two choices:
  • Either only use FFMPEG.WASM, but mobile users will have a slower experience than what they could have
  • Use flutter_ffmpeg in your codebase when your Flutter code detects you're on the mobile app, and use FFMPEG.WASM when your Flutter code detects you're running in a webbrowser (using JS Interop which apparently can import JavaScript libraries like this one in a webbrowser, https://geekyants.com/blog/seamlessly-integrating-javascript-libraries-in-flutter-web-with-js-interop)