FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line program for transcoding multimedia files. FFmpeg is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1+ or GNU General Public License 2+ (depending on which options are enabled).[5]

History
The project was started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym "Gerard Lantau"), and has been maintained by Michael Niedermayer since 2004. Many FFmpeg developers are also part of the MPlayer project. The name of the project comes from the MPEG video standards group, together with "FF" for "fast forward". The logo uses a zigzag pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding. FFmpeg is developed under GNU/Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, AmigaOS and its heir MorphOS. Most computing platforms and microprocessor instruction set architectures are also supported, like x86 (IA-32 and x8664), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS architecture. FFmpeg version 0.5 appeared after a long time without formal releases. FFmpeg developers still always recommend using the latest neutral build from their source code Git version control system. There are two video codecs and one video container invented in the FFmpeg project during its development. The two video codecs are the lossless "FFV1", and the lossless and lossy "Snow codec", the development of which has stalled, while its bitstream format hasn't been finalized yet, making it experimental for now (February 2011), and the multimedia container is "NUT" which is also not being actively developed anymore, but is still maintained. On June 17, 2010, with version 0.6 FFmpeg also supports WebM and VP8. On July 23, 2010 Jason Garrett-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. On March 13, 2011 a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name Libav. The event seems related to a recent issue in project management. Since then, the maintainer of Debian and Ubuntu packages has switched them to the fork.

Components
The project is made of several components: FFmpeg o ffmpeg is a command line tools to convert one video file format to another. It can also grab and encode in real time from a TV card. o ffserver is an HTTP and RTSP multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. It can also time shift live broadcast. o ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries. o ffprobe is a command line tool to show media information. Libav o avconv is a command line tools to convert one video file format to another, similar to ffmpeg. o avserver is a renamed ffserver o avplay is a renamed ffplay o avprobe is a renamed ffprobe libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability. libavformat 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 adler32, crc, md5, sha1, lzo decompressor, Base64 encoder/decoder, des encrypter/decrypter, rc4 encrypter/decrypter and aes encrypter/decrypter. libpostproc is a library containing 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. libswresample is a library containing audio resampling routines.

Codecs, formats and protocols supported

Codecs
Codecs which originated from within the FFmpeg project:

Snow FFV1

The FFmpeg developers have implemented among others:

ITU-T video standards: H.261, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, H.263 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC ITU-T vocoder standards: G.711 -law, G.711 A-law, G.721 (aka G.726 32k), G.722, G.722.2 (aka AMR-WB), G.723 (aka G.726 24k and 40k), G.723.1, G.726, G.729 and G.729D ISO/IEC MPEG video standards: MPEG-1 Part 2, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC ISO/IEC MPEG audio standards: MP1, MP2, MP3, AAC, HE-AAC and MPEG-4 ALS ISO/IEC/ITU-T JPEG image standards: JPEG, JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000 SMPTE video standards: VC-1 (aka WMV3), VC-2 (aka Dirac), VC-3 (aka AVID DNxHD) and DPX image SMPTE audio standards: SMPTE 302M DVD Forum standards related / Dolby audio codecs: MLP (aka TrueHD) and AC-3 3GPP vocoder standards: AMR-NB, AMR-WB (aka G.722.2) GSM related voice codecs: Full Rate Windows Media Player related video codecs: Microsoft RLE, Microsoft Video 1, Cinepak, Indeo 2, 3 and 5,[17] Motion JPEG, Microsoft MPEG-4 v1, v2 and v3, WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3 (aka VC-1) Windows Media Player related audio codecs: WMA1, WMA2 and WMA Pro Windows Media Player related voice codecs: WMA Voice and MSGSM RealPlayer related video codecs: RealVideo 1, 2, 3 and 4 RealPlayer related audio codecs: RealAudio 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 RealPlayer related voice codecs: RealAudio 1, 2 (variant of G.728), 4 and 5 QuickTime related video codecs: Cinepak, Motion JPEG, ProRes, Sorenson 3 Codec, Animation_codec QuickTime related audio codecs: QDesign Music Codec 2 and ALAC Adobe Flash Player related video codecs: Screen video, Screen video 2, Sorenson 3 Codec, VP6 and Flash Video (FLV) Adobe Flash Player related audio codecs: Adobe SWF ADPCM and Nellymoser Asao Xiph.Org: Theora, Speex (via libspeex), Vorbis and FLAC Sony: ATRAC1 and ATRAC3 NTT: TwinVQ On2: Duck TrueMotion 1, Duck TrueMotion 2, VP3, VP5, VP6 and VP8 RAD Game Tools: Smacker video and Bink video Truespeech RenderWare: TXD

The default MPEG-4 codec used by FFmpeg for encoding has the FourCC of FMP4.

Formats

ASF

AVI and also input from AviSynth BFI CAF FLV GXF, General eXchange Format, SMPTE 360M IFF RL2 ISO base media file format (including QuickTime, 3GP and MP4) Matroska (including WebM) Maxis XA MPEG program stream MPEG transport stream (including AVCHD) MXF, Material eXchange Format, SMPTE 377M MSN Webcam stream Ogg OMA TXD WTV

Protocols
IETF standards: TCP, UDP, Gopher, HTTP, RTP, RTSP and SDP Apple related protocols: HTTP Live Streaming RealMedia related protocols: RealMedia RTSP/RDT Adobe related protocols: RTMP, RTMPT (via librtmp), RTMPE (via librtmp), RTMPTE (via librtmp) and RTMPS (via librtmp) Microsoft related protocols: MMS over TCP and MMS over HTTP

Projects using FFmpeg

FFmpeg is used by many open source (and proprietary) projects, including ffmpeg2theora, VLC, MPlayer, HandBrake, Blender, Google Chrome, and others. FFmpeg handles the HTML5 Video and Audio media content in the Origyn Web Browser for MorphOS Operating System. A number of graphical user interfaces for FFmpeg have been developed, including Avanti, Winff, and the Miro Video Converter.