FFmpeg

Two video coding formats with corresponding codecs and one container format have been created within the FFmpeg project so far. The two video codecs are the lossless FFV1, and the lossless and lossy Snow codec. Development of Snow has stalled, while its bit-stream format has not been finalized yet, making it experimental since 2011. The multimedia container format called NUT is no longer being actively developed, but still maintained.[16]

In summer 2010, Fiona Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing, they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder.[17][18] Starting with version 0.6, FFmpeg also supported WebM and VP8.[19]

In October 2013, a native VP9[20] and the OpenHEVC decoder, an open source High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) decoder, were added to FFmpeg.[21] In 2016 the native AAC encoder was considered stable, removing support for the two external AAC encoders from VisualOn and FAAC. FFmpeg 3.0 (nicknamed "Einstein" ) retained build support for the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder.[22] Since version 3.4 "Cantor"  FFmpeg supported the FITS image format.[23] Since November 2018 in version 4.1 "al-Khwarizmi"  AV1 can be muxed in MP4 and Matroska incl. WebM.[24][25]

On March 13, 2011, a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name "Libav".[26][27][28] The event was related to an issue in project management, in which developers disagreed with the leadership of FFmpeg.[29][30][31]

• ffmpeg is a command-line tool that converts audio or video formats. It can also capture and encode in real-time from various hardware and software sources[32] such as a TV capture card.
• ffplay is a simple media player utilizing SDL and the FFmpeg libraries.
• ffprobe is a command-line tool to display media information (text, CSV, XML, JSON), see also Mediainfo.

• libswresample is a library containing audio resampling routines.
• libavresample is a library containing audio resampling routines from the Libav project, similar to libswresample from ffmpeg.
• libavcodec is a library containing all of the native FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability.
• libavformat (Lavf)[7] is a library containing demuxers and muxers for audio/video container formats.
• libavutil is a helper library containing routines common to different parts of FFmpeg. This library includes hash functions (Adler-32, CRC, MD5, RIPEMD, SHA-1. SHA-2, MurmurHash3, HMAC MD-5, HMAC SHA-1 and HMAC SHA-2), ciphers (DES, RC4, AES, AES-CTR, TEA, XTEA, Blowfish, CAST-128, Twofish and Camellia), LZO decompressor and Base64 encoder/decoder.
• libpostproc is a library containing older h263 based video postprocessing routines.
• libswscale is a library containing video image scaling and colorspace/pixelformat conversion routines.
• libavfilter is the substitute for vhook which allows the video/audio to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder. Filters have been ported from many projects including MPlayer and avisynth.

FFmpeg encompasses software implementations of video and audio compressing and decompressing algorithms. These can be compiled and run on diverse instruction sets.

Many widespread instruction sets are supported by FFmpeg, including x86 (IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.[33]

Various application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) related to video and audio compression and decompression do exist. Such ASIC can perform the computation for audio/video decompression or compression partly or fully to offload these from the host CPU. To make use of such ASIC, instead of a complete implementation of some algorithm, only the API is required. There are numerous ASICs and APIs available, of which several are supported by FFmpeg.[34]

Internal hardware acceleration decoding is enabled through the -hwaccel option. It starts decoding normally, but if a decodable stream is detected in hardware, then the decoder designates all significant processing to that hardware, thus accelerating the decoding process. Whereas if no decodable streams are detected (as happens on an unsupported codec or profile), hardware acceleration will be skipped and it will still be decoded in software. -hwaccel_device option is applied when the hardware requires a particular device to function especially there are several graphic cards are available.

FFmpeg supports many common and some uncommon image formats.

The PGMYUV image format is a homebrewn variant of the binary (P5) PGM Netpbm format. FFmpeg also supports 16-bit depths of the PGM and PPM formats, and the binary (P7) PAM format with or without alpha channel, depth 8 bit or 16 bit for pix_fmts monob, gray, gray16be, rgb24, rgb48be, ya8, rgba, rgb64be.

In addition to FFV1 and Snow formats, which were created and developed from within FFmpeg, the project also supports the following formats:

Output formats (container formats and other ways of creating output streams) in FFmpeg are called "muxers". FFmpeg supports, among others, the following:

FFmpeg supports many pixel formats.[48] Some of these formats are only supported as input formats. The command ffmpeg -pix_fmts provides a list of supported pixel formats.

FFmpeg does not support IMC1-IMC4, AI44, CYMK, RGBE, Log RGB and other formats. It also does not yet support ARGB 1:5:5:5, 2:10:10:10, or other BMP bitfield formats that are not commonly used.

FFmpeg contains more than 100 codecs,[54] most of which use compression techniques of one kind or another. Many such compression techniques may be subject to legal claims relating to software patents.[55] Such claims may be enforceable in countries like the United States which have implemented software patents, but are considered unenforceable or void in member countries of the European Union, for example. Patents for many older codecs, including AC3 and all MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 codecs, have expired.

FFmpeg is licensed under the LGPL license, however, if a particular build of FFmpeg is linked against any GPL libraries (notably x264), then the entire binary is licensed under the GPL.

FFmpeg is used by software such as VLC media player, xine, Shotcut, Cinelerra-GG video editor, Plex, Kodi, Blender, HandBrake, YouTube,[56] and MPC-HC;[57] it handles video and audio playback in Google Chrome,[57] and Linux version of Firefox.[58] Graphical user interface front-ends for FFmpeg have been developed, including XMedia Recode.

FFmpeg is used by ffdshow, LAV Filters, GStreamer FFmpeg plug-in, Perian, OpenMAX IL, and FFmpegInterop to expand the encoding and decoding capabilities of their respective multimedia platform.