FFmpeg

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 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.

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.

Codec history

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, Fiona 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. Starting with version 0.6, FFmpeg also supported WebM and VP8.

In October 2013, a native VP9 and the OpenHEVC decoder, 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.

Command line tools

Libraries

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 sets are supported by FFmpeg, like x86 (IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.

Special purpose hardware

Various application-specific integrated circuit related to video and audio compression and decompression do exist. Such ASIC can perform the computation for audio/video decompression or compression partly or fully to offload these from the host CPU. To make use of such ASIC, instead of a complete implementation of some algorithm, only the API is required. There are numerous ASICs and APIs available, of which several are supported by FFmpeg.

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

Muxers

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

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, RGB Float, 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.

Open standards

De facto standards

Open-source

Proprietary

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.

FFmtech Foundation

In June 2011 an election was organized to establish the board of FFmtech foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated for managing donation funds. It was designed to offer reimbursement for expenses and work done to FFmpeg and Libav. However, according to FFmpeg developer Ronald Bultje the results have been doubtful.

Projects using FFmpeg

FFmpeg is used by software such as VLC media player, xine, Plex, Blender, YouTube, and MPC-HC; it handles video and audio playback in Google Chrome, and Linux version of Firefox. Graphical user interface front-ends for FFmpeg have been developed, including Avanti, and XMedia Recode. JavaCV, a Java wrapper for OpenCV, includes a supplementary Java wrapper for FFmpeg.

FFmpeg is used by ffdshow, LAV Filters, GStreamer FFmpeg plug-in, Perian and OpenMAX IL to expand the encoding and decoding capabilities of their respective multimedia platform.

Libav

On March 13, 2011, a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name "Libav". The event was related to an issue in project management, in which developers disagreed with the leadership of FFmpeg.