FFmpeg 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. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing (trimming and concatenation), video scaling, video post-production effects, and standards compliance (SMPTE, ITU).
FFmpeg also includes other tools: ffplay, a simple media player, and ffprobe, a command-line tool to display media information. 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.
FFmpeg 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. 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.
FFmpeg is published under the LGPL-2.1-or-later or GPL-2.0-or-later, depending on which options are enabled.
Project history The project was started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym "Gérard Lantau") in 2000, and was led by Michael Niedermayer from 2004 until 2015. Some FFmpeg developers were also part of the MPlayer project.
The "FF" in FFmpeg stands for "fast forward." The logo represents a zigzag scan pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding. Alt URL
On March 13, 2011, a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name Libav. The group decided to fork the project due to a disagreement with the leadership of FFmpeg. Libav was declared abandoned in 2020.
On January 10, 2014, two Google employees announced that over 1000 bugs had been fixed in FFmpeg during the previous two years by means of fuzz testing.
In January 2018, the ffserver command-line program – a long-time component of FFmpeg – was removed. The developers had previously deprecated the program citing high maintenance efforts due to its use of internal application programming interfaces.
In April 2026, Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview found a 16-year-old critical vulnerability in FFmpeg codec H.264.
The project publishes a new release every three months on average. While release versions are available from the website for download, FFmpeg developers recommend that users compile the software from source using the latest build from their source code, using the Git version control system.
Codec development 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.
In summer 2010, FFmpeg developers Fiona Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad, announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing, they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder. Starting with version 0.6, FFmpeg also supported WebM and VP8.
In October 2013, a native VP9 decoder and OpenHEVC, an open source High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) decoder, were added to FFmpeg. 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. Since version 3.4 "Cantor" FFmpeg supported the FITS image format. Since November 2018 in version 4.1 "al-Khwarizmi" AV1 can be muxed in MP4 and Matroska, including WebM.
Components
Command-line tools 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 sourcesThis video of Linux desktop (X11) was captured by ffmpeg and encoded in realtime 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.
Libraries libswresample is a library containing audio resampling routines. 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) 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, ciphers, LZO decompressor and Base64 encoder/decoder. 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 (for debugging) between the decoder and the encoder. Filters have been ported from many projects including MPlayer and avisynth. libavdevice is a library containing audio/video io through internal and external devices.
Supported hardware CPUs FFmpeg encompasses software implementations of video and audio compressing and decompressing algorithms. These can be compiled and run on many different instruction sets, including x86 (IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.
Special purpose hardware There are a variety of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for audio/video compression and decompression. These ASICs can partially or completely offload the computation from the host CPU. Instead of a complete implementation of an algorithm, only the API is required to use such an ASIC.
Firm ASIC purpose supported by FFmpeg Details AMD UVD decoding via VDPAU API and VAAPI VCE encoding via VAAPI, considered experimental Amlogic Amlogic Video Engine decoding BlackMagicDeckLinkencoding/decoding real-time ingest and playout Broadcom Crystal HD decoding Samsung Exynos MFCdecoding QualcommHexagonencoding/decoding hwaccel Intel Intel Clear Video decoding (libmfx, VAAPI) Intel Quick Sync Video encoding/decoding (libmfx, VAAPI) Nvidia PureVideo / NVDEC decoding via the VDPAU API as of FFmpeg v1.2 (deprecated)via CUVID API as of FFmpeg v3.1 NVENC encoding as of FFmpeg v2.6
The following APIs are also supported: DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA2, Windows), Direct3D 11 (D3D11VA, Windows), Media Foundation (Windows), Vulkan (VKVA), VideoToolbox (iOS, iPadOS, macOS), RockChip MPP, OpenCL, OpenMAX, MMAL (Raspberry Pi), MediaCodec (Android OS), V4L2 (Linux). Depending on the environment, these APIs may lead to specific ASICs, to GPGPU routines, or to SIMD CPU code.
Supported codecs and formats Image formats
FFmpeg supports many common and some uncommon image formats.
The PGMYUV image format is a homebrew 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.
Supported formats
In addition to FFV1 and Snow formats, which were created and developed from within FFmpeg, the project also supports the following formats: