On March 13, 2011, a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name Libav. The logo uses a zigzag pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding.

The name of the project is inspired by the MPEG video standards group, together with 'FF' for 'fast forward'.

Some FFmpeg developers were also part of the MPlayer project. The project was started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym 'Gérard Lantau') in 2000, and was led by Michael Niedermayer from 2004 until 2015. Encoders and decoders for many audio and video file formats are included, making it highly useful for the transcoding of common and uncommon media files.įFmpeg is published under the LGPL-2.1-or-later or GPL-2.0-or-later, depending on which options are enabled. įFmpeg is part of the workflow of many other software projects, and its libraries are a core part of software media players such as VLC, and has been included in core processing for YouTube and Bilibili. Among included libraries are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by many commercial and free software products, libavformat (Lavf), an audio/video container mux and demux library, and libavfilter, a library for enhancing and editing filters through a Gstreamer-like filtergraph. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing (trimming and concatenation), video scaling, video post-production effects and standards compliance ( SMPTE, ITU).įFmpeg also includes other tools: ffplay, a simple media player and ffprobe, a command-line tool to display media information. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of video and audio files. Unredistributable if compiled with any software with a license incompatible with the GPL įFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. X86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, RISC-V, DEC Alpha, Blackfin, AVR32, SH-4, and SPARC may be compiled for other desktop computers Various, including Windows, macOS, and Linux ( executable programs are only available from third parties, as the project only distributes source code)

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