FFmpeg is a name of a free software project for the multimedia handling licensed under GNU General Public License. The most popular part of the project is ffmpeg command line tool for video and audio encoding/decoding and its main features are the high speed, quality of output and small file sizes. “FF” from FFmpeg means Fast Forward – a control button on media players, and “mpeg” is an abbreviation of the Moving Pictures Experts Group
FFmpeg command-line tools table
| ffmpeg ffplay | fast audio and video encoder/decoder media player |
| ffprobe | shows media files characteristics |
| ffserver | broadcast server for multimedia streaming using HTTP and RTSP protocols |
FFmpeg software libraries table
| libavcodec | software library for various multimedia codecs |
| libavdevice | software library for devices |
| libavfilter | software library containing filters |
| libavformat | software library for media formats |
| libavutil | software library containing various utilities |
| libpostproc | software library for post processing |
| libswresample | software library for audio resampling |
| libswscale | software library for media scaling |
The programming language for all components is C and the source code can be compiled on Linux/Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, etc