About FFmpeg

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.

It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding and playing.

The FFmpeg project tries to provide the best technically possible solution for developers of applications and end users alike. To achieve this we combine the best free software options available. We slightly favor our own code to keep the dependencies on other libs low and to maximize code sharing between parts of FFmpeg. Wherever the question of "best" cannot be answered we support both options so the end user can choose.

Everyone is welcome in FFmpeg and all contributions are welcome too. We are happy to receive patches, pull requests, bug reports, donations or any other type of contribution.

Security is a high priority and code review is always done with security in mind. Though due to the very large amounts of code touching untrusted data security issues are unavoidable and thus we provide as quick as possible updates to our last stable releases when new security issues are found.

FFmpeg Tools

• ffmpeg: a commad line tool to convert multimedia files between formats
• ffplay: a simple media player based on SDL and the FFmpeg libraries
• ffprobe: a simple multimedia stream analyzer

FFmpeg Libraries for developers

• libavutil is a library containing functions for simplifying programming, including random number generators, data structures, mathematics routines, core multimedia utilities, and much more.
• libavcodec is a library containing decoders and encoders for audio/video codecs.
• libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for multimedia container formats.
• libavdevice is a library containing input and output devices for grabbing from and rendering to many common multimedia input/output software frameworks, including Video4Linux, Video4Linux2, VfW, and ALSA.
• libavfilter is a library containing media filters.
• libswscale is a library performing highly optimized image scaling and color space/pixel format conversion operations.
• libswresample is a library performing highly optimized audio resampling, rematrixing and sample format conversion operations.