DuME

DuME, the Duduf Media Encoder is a professional, fast, versatile and easy-to-use Free and Open Source Media Encoder and Streamer.

Key Features

Multiple inputs, multiple outputs

A single job can include multiple inputs and outputs, which can be both files or live streams. DuME can be used for streaming as well as for rendering and transcoding files, and to easily combine and mix different streams.

Read and write to any video and audio format

OpenEXR, AVC h.264, HEVC h.265, VP8/9, ProRes, HAP, .mov, .mp4, .webm…

Thanks to FFmpeg, DuME can read and write to and from almost any existing format, including image sequences and openEXR files. The most common formats, like AVC h.264, HEVC h.265, VP8/9, ProRes, HAP… (contained in .mov, .mp4, .webm…) are natively supported and come with intuitive fine-tuning controls and carefully crafted and efficient presets for the most common needs.

DuME natively and automatically handles color management for most formats, but also includes OCIO to fit in professionnal color-managed pipelines using OpenEXR files.

Rendering

• Render Blender scenes
  DuME can render any Blender scene, and use them as any other stream.
• Render After Effects Projects
  DuME can render your After Effects compositions and transcode them to any format, in a single click.
• Unreal Engine
  DuME can easily be used as an encoder for Unreal Engine renders, automatically piped into a DuME graph for real-time post-processing or encoding them to any format.
• Render queue
  Use DuME as your render manager and queue your jobs. In a future update, DuME will include a dispatcher mode to dispatch jobs on multiple computers or on a render farm.

Filters and adjustment

• Correct, adjust, filter mediae. Mix streams with a nodal view
  Thanks to its nodal view, it’s easy to manage the streams, mix them, add filters, correction and adjustment nodes… DuME benefits from more than 450 media filters from libavfilter, and more and more filters are natively supported like color correction nodes, denoising, stabilization (deshaking), crop and resize, etc.
• Color Management
  DuME can be included in color managed pipelines with options for color space conversions and handling color meta-data, or using OCIO. DuME can read OpenEXR sequences.
  DuME can apply many types of LUTs, and comes with a LUT converter to switch between formats. It can also easily bake OCIO configurations to standard LUTs, including ICC for Photoshop.

Preview and real-time stream

DuME can preview a still image taken from your streams at any time so you can precisely adjust your values, but also include a media player to quickly preview any node or live-stream the result of your graph. But keep in mind DuME is a lightweight media encoder, not a full-featured compositing app 😉

Automation

DuME can easily fit into any existing pipeline and comes with many options to automate it.
Use the Command-Line interface to launch jobs right away, or communicate through a TCP Socket to completely control any running instance of DuME (or just start your instance).
To make this even easier, use the Python or Adobe ExtendScript wrappers to work with DuME from any DCC application using the language you’re used to.
All nodes can save and use presets, and DuME includes pre-made, carefully hand-crafted presets for the most common formats and operations.

Performance: Fast and efficient

DuME benefits from the very fast FFmpeg encoders and filters, and can use your GPU and multiple threads to output your streams in an instant and support real-time streaming.

Concept and future

The goal is for DuME to be as easy to use as possible even for beginners, but without compromise on functionality for advanced users.

To achieve this goal, the development of the application follows these guidelines:

• The User Interface has to be both intuitive and nice-looking, as well as fast.
• Transcoding to standard formats (mp4, PNG…) is straightforward, thanks to carefully hand-crafted presets.
• The most common parameters (resolution, frames per second, codec, quality…) can easily be set through the user interface
• Advanced users can add any other parameter available in FFmpeg thanks to the “custom parameters”. FFmpeg commands and full jobs can be exported to bash scripts (.sh, .bat or .command)
• Common parameters and Custom parameters can be saved as easy-to-use User Presets.

Future

These are some of the features we’d like to develop as soon as possible, thanks to your support.

As DuME is Free and Open-Source Software, we need your help to implement these ideas and continue the development! Donate now or become an RxLab. associate member!

• Live-streaming input and output nodes
  Add a “live-stream” mode to filter nodes according to their performance, and allow only for the real-time-capable nodes.
• Maya / Arnold scene rendering, and other DCC apps.
• More filter nodes…
• Timeline support.
  A timeline to allow for seeking in the streams, and maybe even edit streams together.
• Support for Final Cut XML, EDL, OMF, Open Timeline IO…
  To easily generate jobs from needed clips or rendering the timeline to a media file.
• Dispatcher, client/server mode
  To use DuME with multiple computers or on a render farm.
• Burn-in metadata
  Easily show text on the videos, with useful information and metadata.
• Subtitles
  Support for adding, mixing, editing subtitles.
• Etc.
  These are just some ideas. Some are already planned, maybe even in development already, others are long-term plans, and other ideas may come. To learn all the details about the roadmap for DuME, take a look at the projects here!

License

Software

Copyright (C) 2019-2025 Nicolas Dufresne and Contributors.
This program is free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with DuBuilder. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

This Documentation

Copyright (C) 2025 Nicolas Dufresne and Contributors.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “Documentation License”.