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 A library is a collection of Document, materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or electronic media, digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a ...

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 * Progra ...

for handling video, audio, and other

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

files and streams. At its core is the

command-line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of video and audio files. It is widely used for format

transcoding Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target d ...

, basic editing (trimming and

concatenation In formal language theory and computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining character strings end-to-end. For example, the concatenation of "snow" and "ball" is "snowball". In certain formalisations of concatenat ...

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 High ...

, 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. Th ...

effects and standards compliance (

SMPTE The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the m ...

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 Union ...

). 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 libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. libavcodec is an integral part of many open-source multimedia applications and frameworks. The popular MPV, xine and VLC media players u ...

, an audio/video

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...

library used by many commercial and free software products, libavformat (Lavf), an audio/video

container A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

mux and demux library, and libavfilter, a library for enhancing and editing filters through a

Gstreamer 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 the ...

-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 YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

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 ori ...

. 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 telecommunicat ...

(using the

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name ( orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individu ...

"Gérard Lantau") in 2000, and was led by Michael Niedermayer from 2004 until 2015. Some FFmpeg developers were also part of the

MPlayer MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using ...

project. The name of the project is inspired by the

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and f ...

video standards group, together with "FF" for "fast forward". The logo uses a

zigzag A zigzag is a pattern made up of small corners at variable angles, though constant within the zigzag, tracing a path between two parallel lines; it can be described as both jagged and fairly regular. In geometry, this pattern is described as ...

pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle

entropy encoding In information theory, an entropy coding (or entropy encoding) is any lossless data compression method that attempts to approach the lower bound declared by Shannon's source coding theorem, which states that any lossless data compression method ...

. 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. 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), a 1972 American comedy * '' Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law'', a nonfiction book by Mary Roach * The fuzz, a slang term for police officers Music * Fuzz (electric guitar), distortion effects to create "w ...

. 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 ...

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 In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

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 ...

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. No ...

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 libvpx is a free software video codec library from Google and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). It serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 video coding formats, and for AV1 a special fork named libaom that ...

decoder. Starting with version 0.6, FFmpeg also supported

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponso ...

and VP8. In October 2013, a native VP9 decoder and OpenHEVC, an open source

High Efficiency Video Coding High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In comp ...

(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 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 SBR, ...

. 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 commo ...

image format. Since November 2018 in version 4.1 ''"al-Khwarizmi"'' AV1 can be muxed in MP4 and Matroska incl.

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 Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

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 se ...

), see also

Mediainfo MediaInfo is a free, cross-platform and open-source program that displays technical information about media files, as well as tag information for many audio and video files. It is used in many programs such as XMedia Recode, MediaCoder, eMule, a ...

Libraries

* ''libswresample'' is a library containing audio resampling routines. * ''libavresample'' is a library containing audio resampling routines from the Libav project, similar to ''libswresample'' from ''ffmpeg''. * ''

'' 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 In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data (more specifically, a sequence of 8-bit bytes) in sequences of 24 bits that can be represented by four 6-bit Base64 digits. Common to all bina ...

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 In computer graphics and digital imaging, image scaling refers to the resizing of a digital image. In video technology, the magnification of digital material is known as upscaling or resolution enhancement. When scaling a vector graphic image ...

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 represen ...

/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

and

avisynth AviSynth is a frameserver program for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS initially developed by Ben Rudiak-Gould, Edwin van Eggelen, Klaus Post, Richard Berg and Ian Brabham in May 2000 and later picked up and maintained by the open source communi ...

. * ''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 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called i386) is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarnatio ...

and

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

), 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– IBM– ...

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

DEC Alpha Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set compute ...

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

, 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 Netpbm (formerly Pbmplus) is an open-source package of graphics programs and a programming library. It is used mainly in the Unix world, where one can find it included in all major open-source operating system distributions, but also works on Micr ...

. 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 ...

* 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 AviSynth is a frameserver program for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS initially developed by Ben Rudiak-Gould, Edwin van Eggelen, Klaus Post, Richard Berg and Ian Brabham in May 2000 and later picked up and maintained by the open source communi ...

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

ISO base media file format The ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) is a container file format that defines a general structure for files that contain time-based multimedia data such as video and audio. It is standardized in ISO/IEC 14496-12, a.k.a. MPEG-4 Part 12, and wa ...

(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 a ...

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

) * Maxis XA * MPEG-DASH *

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 ...

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 syste ...

(including

AVCHD AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around th ...

) * MXF, Material eXchange Format, SMPTE 377M * MSN Webcam stream * NUT * Ogg * 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 tech ...

* 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 The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is enc ...

** RTP **

RTSP The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an application-level network protocol designed for multiplexing and packetizing multimedia transport streams (such as interactive media, video and audio) over a suitable transport protocol. RTSP is u ...

SCTP The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a computer networking communications protocol in the transport layer of the Internet protocol suite. Originally intended for Signaling System 7 (SS7) message transport in telecommunication, the p ...

** SDP ** SRTP ** TCP **

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 decisio ...

* IETF I-Ds: ** SFTP (via libssh) * Microsoft OSP: ** CIFS/SMB (via libsmbclient) ** MMS over TCP (MS-MMSP) **MMS over HTTP (MS-WMSP) *

CENELEC CENELEC (french: Comité Européen de Normalisation Électrotechnique; en, European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization) is responsible for European standardization in the area of electrical engineering. Together with ETSI (telecommun ...

** 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-subsc ...

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

De facto standard A ''de facto'' standard is a custom or convention that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (for example, by early entrance to the market). is a Latin phrase (literally " in fact"), here meaning "in practice b ...
s

* RTSP over TLS *

Icecast Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack Mo ...

protocol * Adobe RTMP, RTMPT, RTMPE, RTMPTE and RTMPS * RealMedia RTSP/ RDT * ZeroMQ (via libzmq) * RIST (librist)

Supported filters

FFmpeg supports, among others, the following filters.

Audio

* Resampling (aresample) * Pass/Stop filters **

Low-pass filter A low-pass filter is a filter that passes signals with a frequency lower than a selected cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies higher than the cutoff frequency. The exact frequency response of the filter depends on the filt ...

(lowpass) **

High-pass filter A high-pass filter (HPF) is an electronic filter that passes signals with a frequency higher than a certain cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies lower than the cutoff frequency. The amount of attenuation for each frequency ...

(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 i ...

(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 A band-pass filter or bandpass filter (BPF) is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects (attenuates) frequencies outside that range. Description In electronics and signal processing, a filter is usually a two-port ...

(bandpass) ** Butterworth

Band-stop filter In signal processing, a band-stop filter or band-rejection filter is a filter that passes most frequencies unaltered, but attenuates those in a specific range to very low levels. It is the opposite of a band-pass filter. A notch filter is a ...

(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 In signal processing, when describing a periodic function in the time domain, the DC bias, DC component, DC offset, or DC coefficient is the mean amplitude of the waveform. If the mean amplitude is zero, there is no DC bias. A waveform with n ...

(dcshift) *

Expression evaluation A formula calculator is a software calculator that can perform a calculation in two steps: # Enter the calculation by typing it in from the keyboard. # Press a single button or key to see the final result. This is unlike button-operated calculato ...

Time domain Time domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions, physical signals or time series of economic or environmental data, with respect to time. In the time domain, the signal or function's value is known for all real numbers, for the c ...

expression evaluation (aeval) **

Frequency domain In physics, electronics, control systems engineering, and statistics, the frequency domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions or signals with respect to frequency, rather than time. Put simply, a time-domain graph shows how a s ...

expression evaluation (afftfilt) * Dynamics **

Limiter In electronics, a limiter is a circuit that allows signals below a specified input power or level to pass unaffected while attenuating (lowering) the peaks of stronger signals that exceed this threshold. Limiting is a type of dynamic range comp ...

(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 tr ...

(acompressor) ** Dynamic range expander () ** Side-chain Compressor (sidechaincompress) **

Compander In telecommunication and signal processing, companding (occasionally called compansion) is a method of mitigating the detrimental effects of a channel with limited dynamic range. The name is a portmanteau of the words compressing and expanding, ...

(compand) **

Noise gate A noise gate or gate is an electronic device or software that is used to control the volume of an audio signal. Comparable to a compressor, which attenuates signals ''above'' a threshold, such as loud attacks from the start of musical notes, no ...

(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 redu ...

(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 Flanging is an audio signal processing, audio effect produced by mixing two identical audio signal, signals together, one signal delayed by a small and (usually) gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds. This produces a s ...

(flanger) ** Pulsator (apulsator) * Echo/Reverb **

Echo In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound. The delay is directly proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface from the source and the lis ...

(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 a ...

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

*** 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 rec ...

(acrossfade) *

Audio time stretching and pitch scaling Time stretching is the process of changing the speed or duration of an audio signal without affecting its pitch. Pitch scaling is the opposite: the process of changing the pitch without affecting the speed. Pitch shift is pitch scaling implement ...

** 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), ...

(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 Mixer may refer to: Electronics * DJ mixer, a type of audio mixing console used by disc jockeys * Electronic mixer, electrical circuit for adding signal voltages * Frequency mixer, electrical circuit that creates new frequencies from two signals ...

(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 High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) is a proprietary audio encode-decode process that claims to provide increased dynamic range over that of standard Compact Disc Digital Audio, while retaining backward compatibility with existing compact ...

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 des ...

(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 ...

(fade) ** Scaling (scale) ** Padding (pad) ** Rotation (rotate) ** Transposition (transpose) ** Others: *** Lens correction (lenscorrection) ***

OpenCV OpenCV (''Open Source Computer Vision Library'') is a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real-time computer vision. Originally developed by Intel, it was later supported by Willow Garage then Itseez (which was later acquired by In ...

filtering (ocv) *** Perspective correction (perspective) * Temporal editing **

Framerate Frame rate (expressed in or FPS) is the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images ( frames) are captured or displayed. The term applies equally to film and video cameras, computer graphics, and motion capture systems. Frame rate may also be ...

(fps, framerate) ** Looping (loop) ** Trimming (trim) *

Deinterlacing Deinterlacing is the process of converting interlaced video into a non-interlaced or Progressive scan, progressive form. Interlaced video signals are commonly found in analog television, digital television (HDTV) when in the 1080i format, some D ...

(bwdif, idet, kerndeint, nnedi, yadif, w3fdif) *

Inverse Telecine Telecine ( or ) is the process of transferring film into video and is performed in a color suite. The term is also used to refer to the equipment used in the post-production process. Telecine enables a motion picture, captured originally on fi ...

* Filtering ** Blurring (boxblur, gblur, avgblur, sab, smartblur) **

Convolution In mathematics (in particular, functional analysis), convolution is a mathematical operation on two functions ( and ) that produces a third function (f*g) that expresses how the shape of one is modified by the other. The term ''convolution'' ...

filters *** Convolution (convolution) ***

Edge detection Edge detection includes a variety of mathematical methods that aim at identifying edges, curves in a digital image at which the image brightness changes sharply or, more formally, has discontinuities. The same problem of finding discontinuitie ...

(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 I ...

(sobel) *** Prewitt Filter (prewitt) ***

Unsharp masking Unsharp masking (USM) is an image sharpening technique, first implemented in darkroom photography, but now commonly used in digital image processing software. Its name derives from the fact that the technique uses a blurred, or "unsharp", negat ...

(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 und ...

(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 informa ...

(

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 , whi ...

channel editing (alphaextract, alphamerge) * Keying (chromakey, colorkey, lumakey) * Frame detection ** Black frame detection (blackdetect, blackframe) ** Thumbnail selection (thumbnail) * Frame Blending (blend, tblend, overlay) *

Video stabilization Image stabilization (IS) is a family of techniques that reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera or other imaging device during exposure. Generally, it compensates for pan and tilt (angular movement, equivalent to yaw and pit ...

(vidstabdetect, vidstabtransform) * Color and Level adjustments **

Balance Balance or balancing may refer to: Common meanings * Balance (ability) in biomechanics * Balance (accounting) * Balance or weighing scale * Balance as in equality or equilibrium Arts and entertainment Film * ''Balance'' (1983 film), a Bulgaria ...

and levels (colorbalance, colorlevels) ** Channel mixing (colorchannelmixer) **

Color space 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 represen ...

(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 cor ...

(waveform) **

Color histogram In image processing and photography, a color histogram is a representation of the distribution of colors in an image. For digital images, a color histogram represents the number of pixels that have colors in each of a fixed list of color ranges, ...

(histogram) * Drawing * OCR * Quality measures ** SSIM (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 Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Inc., and used in the post-production process of film making, video games and television production. Among other things, After Eff ...

3dl *

DaVinci Resolve DaVinci Resolve (originally known as da Vinci Resolve) is a color grading, color correction, visual effects, and audio post-production video editing application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, originally developed by da Vinci Systems, and now ...

dat *

Pandora In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek language, 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 ...

m3d

Supported media and interfaces

FFmpeg supports the following devices via external libraries.

Media

Compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in O ...

(via libcdio; input only)

Physical interfaces

IEEE 1394 IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony an ...

(a.k.a. FireWire; via libdc1394 and libraw1394; input only) *

IEC 61883 IEC 61883 Consumer Audio/Video Equipment - Digital Interface is a technical standard for a digital interface that is used by IEEE 1394 (FireWire) devices for audio and video equipment. The standard for these devices is maintained by the Internation ...

(via libiec61883; input only) * DeckLink *

Brooktree Brooktree was an American company founded in 1983 by Henry Katzenstein to commercialize a faster hardware architecture for digital to analog converters, three to eight times faster than the converters then on the market. The company was bough ...

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 wer ...

(ALSA) * Open Sound System (OSS) *

PulseAudio PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operat ...

JACK Audio Connection Kit JACK Audio Connection Kit (or JACK; a recursive acronym) is a professional sound server API and pair of daemon implementations to provide real-time, low-latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications. JACK was developed by ...

(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 har ...

* Core Audio (for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

) ** 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 ...

2 *

Video for Windows Video for Windows was a suite of video playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows ...

(input only) * Windows DirectShow * Android Camera (input only)

Screen capture and output

Simple DirectMedia Layer Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in sever ...

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 The Linux framebuffer (fbdev) is a linux subsystem used to show graphics on a computer monitor, typically on the system console. It was designed as a hardware-independent API to give user space software access to the framebuffer (the part of ...

(fbdev) *

Graphics Device Interface The Graphics Device Interface (GDI) is a legacy component of Microsoft Windows responsible for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers. Windows apps use Windows API to interact with GD ...

(GDI; input only) *

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

(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 ...

; 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 Xlib (also known as libX11) is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the ...

; 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 char ...

(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 patent A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm. Background A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time ...

s. 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 The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...

, 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. Hi ...

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

Projects using FFmpeg

FFmpeg is used by software such as

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender container with a rotating me ...

, Cinelerra-GG Infinity, HandBrake, Kodi,

MPC-HC Media Player Classic (MPC), Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), and Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) are a family of free and open-source, compact, lightweight, and customizable media players for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft ...

, Plex, Shotcut, VirtualDub2 (a VirtualDub fork),

VLC media player VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desk ...

xine xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries ...

and

.. 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 OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration), often shortened as "OMX", is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful for processing of audio, ...

to expand the encoding and decoding capabilities of their respective multimedia platforms. As part of

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

Mars 2020 Mars 2020 is a Mars rover mission forming part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program that includes the rover '' Perseverance'', the small robotic, coaxial helicopter '' Ingenuity'', and associated delivery vehicles. Mars 2020 was launched from ...

mission, FFmpeg is used by the

Perseverance rover ''Perseverance'', nicknamed ''Percy'', is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Jezero crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched on July 30, 2020, at 11:50 ...

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