FFmpeg is a computer program that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. FFmpeg is a command line tool that is composed of a collection of free software / open source libraries. It includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, and libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library. 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.

There are many other open source projects based on FFmpeg. A very popular video player on linux is MPlayer. The project is now maintained by a large group of open source and video enthusiasts.

FFmpeg is developed under GNU/Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Apple Inc. Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and AmigaOS. Most computing platforms and microprocessor instruction set architecture are also supported, like x86 (IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS architecture.

Windows DLLs are not portable, bloated and often slow. Moreover FFmpeg strives to support all codecs natively. A DLL loader is not conducive to that goal. For multithreaded MPEG* encoding, the encoded slices must be independent, otherwise thread n would practically have to wait for n-1 to finish, so it’s quite logical that there is a small reduction of quality. This is not a bug.

FFmpeg can be hooked up with a number of external libraries to add support for more formats. None of them are used by default, their use has to be explicitly requested by passing the appropriate flags to `./configure’. Release 0.5 is codenamed “half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed” to give an idea where we stand in the grand scheme of things and to commemorate the many fruitful discussions we had during its development. This release includes a very extensive number of changes

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