FFmpeg is a

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

project consisting of a suite of libraries and

programs Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to: Business and management * Program management, the process of managing several related projects * Time management * Program, a part of planning Arts and entertainment Audio * Programm ...

for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing (trimming and concatenation),

video scaling A video scaler is a system which converts video signals from one display resolution to another; typically, scalers are used to convert a signal from a lower resolution (such as 480p standard definition) to a higher resolution (such as 1080i hig ...

, video

post-production Post-production is part of the process of filmmaking, video production, audio production, and photography. Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording individual program segments. The ...

effects and standards compliance ( SMPTE,

ITU The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Unio ...

). 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 Bilibili (stylized bilibili), nicknamed B Site, is a video sharing website based in Shanghai where users can submit, view and add overlaid commentary on videos. Since the mid-2010s, Bilibili began to expand to a broader audience from its origi ...

. 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.

History

The project was started by

Fabrice Bellard Fabrice Bellard (; born 1972) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunication ...

(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 name of the project is inspired by 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. On March 13, 2011, a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name

Libav Libav is an abandoned free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that contains libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. History Fork from FFmpeg The Libav project was a fork of the FFmpeg project. It was announced on ...

. The event was related to an issue in project management, in which developers disagreed with the leadership of FFmpeg. 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 Fuzz may refer to: * Fuzz (film), ''Fuzz'' (film), a 1972 American comedy * ''Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law'', a nonfiction book by Mary Roach * The fuzz, a List of slang terms for police officers, slang term for police officers Music * Fuzz ...

. 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 interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

s. 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 Git

version control system In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

Codec history

Two video coding formats with corresponding codecs and one

container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Notab ...

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 VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google. VP9 is the successor to VP8 and competes mainly with MPEG's High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). At first, VP9 was mainly used on Google's video platform YouTube. ...

decoder and OpenHEVC, an open source High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) decoder, were added to FFmpeg. In 2016 the native

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

encoder was considered stable, removing support for the two external AAC encoders from

VisualOn VisualOn is a Silicon Valleybased multimedia software company that provides high-definition audio and video entertainment to smartphones, tablets, laptops, connected TVs and other mobile and convergent devices. VisualOn's patented technology is ...

and

FAAC FAAC or Freeware Advanced Audio Coder is a software project which includes the AAC encoder FAAC and decoder FAAD2. It supports MPEG-2 AAC as well as MPEG-4 AAC. It supports several MPEG-4 Audio object types (LC, Main, LTP for encoding and SB ...

. FFmpeg 3.0 (nicknamed ''"Einstein"'') retained build support for the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder. Since version 3.4 ''"Cantor"'' FFmpeg supported the

FITS Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of data: formatted as multi-dimensional arrays (for example a 2D image), or tables. FITS is the most com ...

image format. Since November 2018 in version 4.1 ''"al-Khwarizmi"'' AV1 can be muxed in MP4 and Matroska incl. 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 sources 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 JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

), see also Mediainfo.

Libraries

* ''libswresample'' is a library containing audio resampling routines. * ''libavresample'' is a library containing audio resampling routines from the

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) 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. * ''libpostproc'' is a library containing older

H.263 H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videotelephony. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x fam ...

based video postprocessing routines. * ''libswscale'' is a library containing video image scaling and

colorspace A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital representa ...

/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. * ''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 diverse instruction sets. Many widespread

instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ' ...

s are supported by FFmpeg, including x86 ( IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

), 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.

Use with the FFmpeg utility

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 when there are several graphic cards available.

Supported codecs and formats

Image formats

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''.

Supported formats

In addition to FFV1 and Snow formats, which were created and developed from within FFmpeg, the project also supports the following formats: The data can be passed through without being processed through -c copy. One use is cutting video footage without requiring the time and processing of re-encoding.

Muxers

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

AIFF Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...

* ASF *

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

and also input from AviSynth * BFI * CAF *

FLV Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are ...

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

* GXF, General eXchange Format, SMPTE 360M * HLS, HTTP Live Streaming *

IFF In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is bicon ...

* ISO base media file format (including

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

3GP 3GP (3GPP file format) is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones. 3G2 (3GPP2 ...

and MP4) * Matroska (including WebM) * Maxis XA *

MPEG-DASH Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple ...

MPEG program stream Program stream (PS or MPEG-PS) is a container format for multiplexing digital audio, video and more. The PS format is specified in MPEG-1 Part 1 (ISO/IEC 11172-1) and MPEG-2 Part 1, Systems (ISO/IEC standard 13818-1/ITU-T H.222.0). The MPEG-2 Pr ...

MPEG transport stream MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS, MTS) or simply transport stream (TS) is a standard digital container format for transmission and storage of audio, video, and Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) data. It is used in broadcast systems ...

(including AVCHD) * MXF, Material eXchange Format, SMPTE 377M * MSN Webcam stream * NUT *

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality d ...

* OMA * RL2 * Segment, for creating segmented video streams *

Smooth Streaming Adaptive bitrate streaming is a technique used in streaming multimedia over computer networks. While in the past most video or audio streaming technologies utilized streaming protocols such as RTP with RTSP. Today's adaptive streaming technol ...

* TXD * WTV

Pixel formats

FFmpeg supports many pixel formats. 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.

Supported protocols

Open standards

*IETF RFCs: ** FTP ** Gopher ** HLS ** HTTP ** HTTPS ** RTP ** RTSP ** SCTP ** SDP ** SRTP **

TCP TCP may refer to: Science and technology * Transformer coupled plasma * Tool Center Point, see Robot end effector Computing * Transmission Control Protocol, a fundamental Internet standard * Telephony control protocol, a Bluetooth communication s ...

TLS TLS may refer to: Computing * Transport Layer Security, a cryptographic protocol for secure computer network communication * Thread level speculation, an optimisation on multiprocessor CPUs * Thread-local storage, a mechanism for allocating vari ...

** UDP **

UDP-Lite UDP-Lite (Lightweight User Datagram Protocol) is a connectionless protocol that allows a potentially damaged data payload to be delivered to an application rather than being discarded by the receiving station. This is useful as it allows decisi ...

* IETF I-Ds: ** SFTP (via libssh) * Microsoft

OSP Osp (; it, Ospo) is a village in the City Municipality of Koper in the Littoral region of Slovenia. Overview The Osp Valley is a passage through the karst and coastal region of Istria. It extends from below the village of Črni Kal to the sea ...

: ** CIFS/SMB (via libsmbclient) **

MMS MMS may refer to: Science and technology Network communication protocols * Multimedia Messaging Service for mobile phones * Microsoft Media Server, a content-streaming protocol (mms://) * Manufacturing Message Specification for real time proces ...

over TCP (MS-MMSP) **MMS over HTTP (MS-WMSP) * CENELEC ** SAT>IP *

OASIS In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment'ksar''with its surrounding feeding source, the palm grove, within a relational and circulatory nomadic system.” The location of oases has been of critical imp ...

standards: **

AMQP The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-su ...

0-9-1 (via librabbitmq) * SRT Alliance standard: **

SRT SRT may refer to: Automotive * SRT, (Speed & Racing Technology) American high-performance automobile group associated with Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep. * Suter Racing Technology, a Swiss Moto2 constructor * Selleslagh Racing Team, Belgium * Swiss ...

(via libsrt)

De facto standards

* RTSP over TLS * Icecast protocol * Adobe RTMP, RTMPT, RTMPE, RTMPTE and RTMPS * RealMedia RTSP/ RDT * ZeroMQ (via libzmq) *

RIST Rist is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Boy Rist, Norwegian officer and WWII resistance fighter * Charles Rist (1874–1955), French economist * Gilbert Rist (born 1938), Swiss academic * Johann Rist (1607–1667), German dra ...

(librist)

Supported filters

FFmpeg supports, among others, the following filters.

Audio

* Resampling (aresample) * Pass/Stop filters ** Low-pass filter (lowpass) ** High-pass filter (highpass) **

All-pass filter An all-pass filter is a signal processing filter that passes all frequencies equally in gain, but changes the phase relationship among various frequencies. Most types of filter reduce the amplitude (i.e. the magnitude) of the signal applied to it ...

(allpass) **

Butterworth Butterworth may refer to: Places * Butterworth (ancient township), a former township centred on Milnrow, in the then Parish of Rochdale, England, United Kingdom * Butterworth, Eastern Cape, now also known as Gcuwa, a town located in South Africa ...

Band-pass filter (bandpass) ** Butterworth Band-stop filter (bandreject) * Arbitrary Finite Impulse Response Filter (afir) * Arbitrary Infinite Impulse Response Filter (aiir) * Equalizer ** Peak Equalizer (equalizer) ** Butterworth/ Chebyshev Type I/Type II Multiband Equalizer (anequalizer) ** Low Shelving filter (bass) ** High Shelving filter (treble) ** Xbox 360 rqulizer ** FIR equalizer (firequalizer) **

Biquad filter Electronic filter topology defines electronic filter circuits without taking note of the values of the components used but only the manner in which those components are connected. Filter design characterises filter circuits primarily by their t ...

(biquad) * Remove/Add DC offset (dcshift) * Expression evaluation ** Time domain expression evaluation (aeval) ** Frequency domain expression evaluation (afftfilt) * Dynamics ** Limiter (alimiter) **

Compressor A compressor is a mechanical device that increases the pressure of a gas by reducing its volume. An air compressor is a specific type of gas compressor. Compressors are similar to pumps: both increase the pressure on a fluid and both can transp ...

(acompressor) ** Dynamic range expander () ** Side-chain Compressor (sidechaincompress) ** Compander (compand) ** Noise gate (agate) ** Side-chain Noise gate(sidechaingate) * Distortion **

Bitcrusher A Bitcrusher is an audio effect that produces distortion by reducing of the resolution or bandwidth of digital audio data. The resulting quantization noise may produce a "warmer" sound impression, or a harsh one, depending on the amount of reduct ...

(acrusher) * Emphasis (aemphasis) * Amplify/Normalizer ** Volume (volume) ** Dynamic Audio Normalizer (dynaudnorm) **

EBU R 128 EBU R 128 is a recommendation for loudness normalisation and maximum level of audio signals. It is primarily followed during audio mixing of television and radio programmes and adopted by broadcasters to measure and control programme loudness. ...

loudness normalizer (loudnorm) * Modulation ** Sinusoidal Amplitude Modulation (tremolo) ** Sinusoidal Phase Modulation (vibrato) ** Phaser (aphaser) **

Chorus Chorus may refer to: Music * Chorus (song) or refrain, line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse * Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound * Chorus form, song in which all verse ...

(chorus) ** Flanger (flanger) ** Pulsator (apulsator) * Echo/Reverb ** Echo (aecho) * Routing/ Panning ** Stereo widening (stereowiden) ** Increase channel differences (extrastereo) ** M/S to L/R (stereotools) ** Channel mapping (channelmap) ** Channel splitting (channelsplit) ** Channel panning (pan) ** Channel merging (amerge) ** Channel joining (join) ** for

Headphones Headphones are a pair of small loudspeaker drivers worn on or around the head over a user's ears. They are electroacoustic transducers, which convert an electrical signal to a corresponding sound. Headphones let a single user listen to an au ...

*** Stereo to Binaural (earwax, ported from SoX) *** Bauer Stereo to Binaural (bs2b, via libbs2b) ***

Crossfeed Stereophonic sound, or more commonly stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configuration ...

(crossfeed) *** Multi-channel to Binaural (sofalizer, requires libnetcdf) **

Delay Delay (from Latin: dilatio) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Delay 1968'', a 1981 album by German experimental rock band Can * ''The Delay'', a 2012 Uruguayan film People * B. H. DeLay (1891–1923), American aviator and acto ...

*** Delay (adelay) *** Delay by distance (compensationdelay) * Fade ** Fader (afade) **

Crossfader In audio engineering, a fade is a gradual increase or decrease in the level of an audio signal. The term can also be used for film cinematography or theatre lighting in much the same way (see fade (filmmaking) and fade (lighting)). A recor ...

(acrossfade) * Audio time stretching and pitch scaling ** Time stretching (atempo) ** Time-stretching and Pitch-shifting (rubberband, via librubberband) * Editing **

Trim Trim or TRIM may refer to: Cutting * Cutting or trimming small pieces off something to remove them ** Book trimming, a stage of the publishing process ** Pruning, trimming as a form of pruning often used on trees Decoration * Trim (sewing), or ...

(atrim) ** Silence-padding (apad) ** Silence remover (silenceremove) * Show frame/channel information ** Show frame information (ashowinfo) ** Show channel information (astats) ** Show silence ranges (silencedetect) ** Show audio volumes (volumedetect) ** ReplayGain scanner (replaygain) * Modify frame/channel information ** Set output format (aformat) ** Set number of sample (asetnsamples) ** Set sampling rate (asetrate) * Mixer (amix) *

Synchronization Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronou ...

(asyncts) * HDCD data decoder (hdcd) * Plugins **

LADSPA LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API. It is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. It was originally de ...

(ladspa) ** LV2 (lv2) * Do nothing ()

Video

* Transformations ** Cropping (crop, cropdetect) **

Fading In wireless communications, fading is variation of the attenuation of a signal with various variables. These variables include time, geographical position, and radio frequency. Fading is often modeled as a random process. A fading channel is a ...

(fade) **

Scaling Scaling may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics and physics * Scaling (geometry), a linear transformation that enlarges or diminishes objects * Scale invariance, a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energ ...

(scale) ** Padding (pad) ** Rotation (rotate) ** Transposition (transpose) ** Others: *** Lens correction (lenscorrection) *** OpenCV filtering (ocv) *** Perspective correction (perspective) * Temporal editing ** Framerate (fps, framerate) ** Looping (loop) ** Trimming (trim) * Deinterlacing (bwdif, idet, kerndeint, nnedi, yadif, w3fdif) * Inverse Telecine * Filtering ** Blurring (boxblur, gblur, avgblur, sab, smartblur) ** Convolution filters *** Convolution (convolution) *** Edge detection (edgedetect) ***

Sobel Filter The Sobel operator, sometimes called the Sobel–Feldman operator or Sobel filter, is used in image processing and computer vision, particularly within edge detection algorithms where it creates an image emphasising edges. It is named after ...

(sobel) *** Prewitt Filter (prewitt) *** Unsharp masking (unsharp) *

Denoising Noise reduction is the process of removing noise from a signal. Noise reduction techniques exist for audio and images. Noise reduction algorithms may distort the signal to some degree. Noise rejection is the ability of a circuit to isolate an un ...

(atadenoise, bitplanenoise, dctdnoiz, owdenoise, removegrain) * Logo removal (delogo, removelogo) *

Subtitles Subtitles and captions are lines of dialogue or other text displayed at the bottom of the screen in films, television programs, video games or other visual media. They can be transcriptions of the screenplay, translations of it, or informati ...

(

ASS Ass most commonly refers to: * Buttocks (in informal American English) * Donkey or ass, ''Equus africanus asinus'' **any other member of the subgenus ''Asinus'' Ass or ASS may also refer to: Art and entertainment * ''Ass'' (album), 1973 albu ...

, subtitles) *

Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

channel editing (alphaextract, alphamerge) *

Keying Keying may refer to: * Keying (electrical connector), used by electrical connectors to prevent mating in incorrect orientation * Keying (graphics), a technique for compositing two full frame images together * Keying (official) (1787–1858), a M ...

(chromakey, colorkey, lumakey) * Frame detection ** Black frame detection (blackdetect, blackframe) ** Thumbnail selection (thumbnail) * Frame Blending (blend, tblend, overlay) * Video stabilization (vidstabdetect, vidstabtransform) * Color and Level adjustments ** Balance and levels (colorbalance, colorlevels) ** Channel mixing (colorchannelmixer) ** Color space (colorspace) ** Parametric adjustments (curves, eq) * Histograms and visualization ** CIE Scope (ciescope) **

Vectorscope A vectorscope is a special type of oscilloscope used in both audio and video applications. Whereas an oscilloscope or waveform monitor normally displays a plot of signal vs. time, a vectorscope displays an X-Y plot of two signals, which can r ...

(vectorscope) **

Waveform monitor A waveform monitor is a special type of oscilloscope used in television production applications. It is typically used to measure and display the level, or voltage, of a video signal with respect to time. The level of a video signal usually corre ...

(waveform) ** Color histogram (histogram) * Drawing * OCR * Quality measures **

SSIM The structural similarity index measure (SSIM) is a method for predicting the perceived quality of digital television and cinematic pictures, as well as other kinds of digital images and videos. SSIM is used for measuring the similarity between tw ...

(ssim) ** PSNR (psnr) * Lookup Tables ** lut, lutrgb, lutyuv, lut2, lut3d, haldclut

Supported test patterns

SMPTE color bars SMPTE color bars are a television test pattern used where the NTSC video standard is utilized, including countries in North America. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) refers to the pattern as Engineering Guideline ( ...

(smptebars and smptehdbars) * EBU color bars (pal75bars and pal100bars)

Supported LUT formats

cineSpace Cospective Pty Ltd, formerly Rising Sun Research, is an Australian software firm located in Adelaide, South Australia. It is the Australian arm of the international ftrack organisation. The company originated as a technology spin-off from the ...

LUT format * Iridas Cube * Adobe After Effects 3dl * DaVinci Resolve dat *

Pandora In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek: , derived from , ''pān'', i.e. "all" and , ''dōron'', i.e. "gift", thus "the all-endowed", "all-gifted" or "all-giving") was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hes ...

m3d

Supported media and interfaces

FFmpeg supports the following devices via external libraries.

Media

* Compact disc (via libcdio; input only)

Physical interfaces

* IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. FireWire; via libdc1394 and libraw1394; input only) * IEC 61883 (via libiec61883; input only) * DeckLink * Brooktree video capture chip (via bktr driver; input only)

Audio IO

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers. Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were ...

(ALSA) * Open Sound System (OSS) * PulseAudio * JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK; input only) *

OpenAL OpenAL (Open Audio Library) is a cross-platform audio application programming interface (API). It is designed for efficient rendering of multichannel three-dimensional positional audio. Its API style and conventions deliberately resemble those ...

(input only) *

sndio sndio is the software layer of the OpenBSD operating system that manages sound cards and MIDI ports. It provides an optional sound server and a documented application programming interface to access either the server or the audio and MIDI hard ...

* Core Audio (for macOS) ** AVFoundation (input only) ** AudioToolbox (output only)

Video IO

Video4Linux Video4Linux (V4L for short) is a collection of device drivers and an API for supporting realtime video capture on Linux systems. It supports many USB webcams, TV tuners, and related devices, standardizing their output, so programmers can easily ad ...

2 * Video for Windows (input only) * Windows DirectShow * Android Camera (input only)

Screen capture and output

* Simple DirectMedia Layer 2 (output only) *

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

(output only) * Linux framebuffer (fbdev) * Graphics Device Interface (GDI; input only) * X Window System (X11; via

XCB XCB (''X protocol C-language Binding'') is a library implementing the client-side of the X11 display server protocol. XCB is written in the C programming language and distributed under the MIT License. The project was started in 2001 by B ...

; input only) *

X video extension The X video extension, often abbreviated as XVideo or Xv, is a video output mechanism for the X Window System. The protocol was designed by David Carver; the specification for version 2 of the protocol was written in July 1991. It is mainly use ...

(XV; via Xlib; output only) *

Kernel Mode Setting The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations su ...

(via libdrm; input only)

Others

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...

(via libcaca; output only)

Applications

Legal aspects

FFmpeg contains more than 100 codecs, 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. 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, but if a particular build of FFmpeg is linked against any GPL libraries (notably

x264 x264 is a free and open-source software library and a command-line utility developed by VideoLAN for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. History ...

), then the entire binary is licensed under the GPL.

Projects using FFmpeg

FFmpeg is used by software such as Blender, Cinelerra-GG Infinity, HandBrake,

Kodi KODI (1400 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a news/talk format. Licensed to Cody, Wyoming, United States, the station is currently owned by the Big Horn Radio Network, a division of Legend Communications of Wyoming, LLC, and features programm ...

, MPC-HC, Plex,

Shotcut Shotcut is a free and open-source, cross-platform Video editing software, video, Audio editing software, audio, and Graphics software, image editing program for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows. Started in 2011 by Dan Dennedy, Shotcut is develo ...

, VirtualDub2 (a VirtualDub fork), VLC media player, xine and YouTube.. It handles video and audio playback in

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...

and the Linux version of Firefox.

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

front-ends for FFmpeg have been developed, including Multimedia Xpert and XMedia Recode. FFmpeg is used by

ffdshow ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX or Xvid) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as we ...

, FFmpegInterop, the

GStreamer FFmpeg plug-in GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, ...

, LAV Filters and OpenMAX IL to expand the encoding and decoding capabilities of their respective multimedia platforms. As part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, FFmpeg is used by the Perseverance rover on Mars for image and video compression before footage is sent to Earth.

References

External links

* {{Compression software Assembly language software Command-line software C (programming language) libraries Cross-platform free software Free codecs Free computer libraries Free music software Free software programmed in C Free video conversion software Multimedia frameworks Software that uses FFmpeg Software using the LGPL license