Libav is an abandoned free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that contains 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 multimedia data.

History

Fork from FFmpeg

The Libav project was a fork of the FFmpeg project. It was announced on March 13, 2011 by a group of FFmpeg developers. The event was related to an issue in project management and different goals: FFmpeg supporters wanted to keep development velocity in favour of more features, while Libav supporters and developers wanted to improve the state of the code and take the time to design better APIs. The maintainer of the FFmpeg packages for

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

and Ubuntu, being one of the group of developers who forked FFmpeg, switched the packages to this fork in 2011. Hence, most software on these systems that depended on FFmpeg automatically switched to Libav. On July 8, 2015, Debian announced it would return to FFmpeg for various, technical reasons. Several arguments justified this step. Firstly, FFmpeg had a better record of responding to vulnerabilities than Libav. Secondly, Mateusz "j00ru" Jurczyk, a security-oriented developer at Google, argued that all issues he found in FFmpeg were fixed in a timely manner, while Libav was still affected by various bugs. Finally, FFmpeg supported a far wider variety of codecs and containers than Libav. Libav is an abandoned software project, with Libav developers either returning to FFmpeg, moving to other multimedia projects like the AV1 video codec, or leaving the multimedia field entirely.

Confusion

At the beginning of this fork, Libav and FFmpeg separately developed their own versions of the ffmpeg command. Libav then renamed their ffmpeg to avconv to distance themselves from the FFmpeg project. During the transition period, when a Libav user typed ffmpeg, there was a message telling the user that the ffmpeg command was deprecated and avconv has to be used instead. This confused some users into thinking that FFmpeg (the project) was dead. This message was removed

upstream Upstream may refer to: * Upstream (bioprocess) * ''Upstream'' (film), a 1927 film by John Ford * Upstream (networking) * ''Upstream'' (newspaper), a newspaper covering the oil and gas industry * Upstream (petroleum industry) * Upstream (software ...

when ffmpeg was finally removed from the Libav sources. In June 2012, on Ubuntu 12.04, the message was re-worded, but that new "deprecated" message caused even more user confusion. Starting with Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid", FFmpeg's ffmpeg is back in the repositories again. To further complicate matters, Libav chose a name that was used by FFmpeg to refer to its libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, etc.). For example, the libav-user mailing list, for questions and discussions about using the FFmpeg libraries, is unrelated to the Libav project.

Software using Libav instead of FFmpeg

Debian followed Libav when it was announced, and announced it would return to FFmpeg for Debian Stretch (9.0). MPlayer2, a defunct fork of MPlayer, used Libav exclusively, but could be used with GStreamer with its public API. The MPV media player no longer supports Libav due to missing API changes.

Legal aspects

Codecs

Libav contains more than 100 codecs. Many codecs that compress information have been claimed by patent holders. Such claims may be enforceable in countries like the United States which have implemented software patents, but are considered unenforceable or void in countries that have not implemented software patents.

Logo

The Libav logo uses a zigzag pattern that references how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding. It was previously the logo of the FFmpeg project until Libav was forked from it. Following the fork, in 2011 one of the Libav developers Måns Rullgård claimed copyright over the logo and requested FFmpeg

cease and desist A cease and desist letter is a document sent to an individual or business to stop alleged illegal activity. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not dis ...

from using it. FFmpeg subsequently altered their logo into a 3D version.

Google Summer of Code participation

Libav participated in the Google Summer of Code program in 2011 and 2012. With participation in the Google Summer of Code, Libav has had many new features and improvements developed, including a WMVP/WVP2 decoder, hardware accelerated H.264 decoding on

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

, and

G.723.1 G.723.1 is an audio codec for voice that compresses voice audio in frames. An algorithmic look-ahead of duration means that total algorithmic delay is . Its official name is ''Dual rate speech coder for multimedia communications transmitting at ...

codec support.

Technical details

Components

Libav primarily consists of libavcodec, which is an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, ''libavformat'', which is an audio/video container muxing and demuxing library, and ''avconv'', which is a multimedia manipulation tool similar to FFmpeg's ''ffmpeg'' or Gstreamer ''gst-launch-1.0'' command. The command line-programs: ;avconv : A video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. ;avserver : A streaming server for both audio and video. ;avplay : A very simple and portable media player using the Libav libraries and the SDL library. ;avprobe : Gathers information from multimedia streams and prints it in human- and machine-readable fashion. The libraries: ; libavcodec : A library containing all the Libav audio/video encoders and decoders. ;libavfilter : The substitute for ''vhook'' which allows the video/audio to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder. ;libavformat : A library containing demuxers and muxers for audio and video container formats. ;libavresample : A library containing audio resampling routines. ;libavutil : A helper library containing routines common to different parts of Libav. This library includes Adler-32, CRC, MD5, SHA-1, LZO decompressor, Base64 encoder/decoder,

DES Des is a masculine given name, mostly a short form (hypocorism) of Desmond. People named Des include: People * Des Buckingham, English football manager * Des Corcoran, (1928–2004), Australian politician * Des Dillon (disambiguation), sever ...

encrypter/decrypter,

RC4 In cryptography, RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4, also known as ARC4 or ARCFOUR, meaning Alleged RC4, see below) is a stream cipher. While it is remarkable for its simplicity and speed in software, multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in RC4, ren ...

encrypter/decrypter and

AES AES may refer to: Businesses and organizations Companies * AES Corporation, an American electricity company * AES Data, former owner of Daisy Systems Holland * AES Eletropaulo, a former Brazilian electricity company * AES Andes, formerly AES Gener ...

encrypter/decrypter. ;libswscale : 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.

Contained codecs

Numerous

free and open-source 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 ...

implementations of existing algorithms for the (usually lossy) compression and decompression of audio or video data, called codecs, are available. Please note that an algorithm can be subject to patent law in some jurisdictions. Here are lists of the ones contained in the libav library:

Video codecs

Libav includes video decoders and/or encoders for the following formats: * Adobe Flash Player related video codecs: Screen video, Screen video 2, Sorenson 3 Codec,

VP6 On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Vi ...

and Flash Video (FLV) * Asus v1 * Asus v2 * AVS (decoding only) *

CamStudio CamStudio is an open-source screencasting program for Microsoft Windows released as free software. The software renders videos in an Audio Video Interleave, AVI format. It can also convert these AVIs into Flash Video format, embedded in SWF fi ...

(decoding only) *

Cinepak Cinepak is a lossy video codec developed by Peter Barrett at SuperMac Technologies, and released in 1991 with the Video Spigot, and then in 1992 as part of Apple Computer's QuickTime video suite. One of the first video compression tools to achiev ...

(decoding only) *

Creative Creative may refer to: *Creativity, phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created * "Creative" (song), a 2008 song by Leon Jackson * Creative class, a proposed socioeconomic class * Creative destruction, an economic term * Creative dir ...

YUV (CYUV, decoding only) * Dirac (via libschroedinger) *

DNxHD Avid DNxHD ("Digital Nonlinear Extensible High Definition") is a lossy high-definition video post-production codec developed by Avid for multi-generation compositing with reduced storage and bandwidth requirements. It is an implementation of SMP ...

* Duck TrueMotion v1 (decoding only) * Duck TrueMotion v2 (decoding only) * Flash Screen Video * FFV1 * ITU-T video standards:

H.261 H.261 is an ITU-T video compression standard, first ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG, then Specialists Gro ...

, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2,

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 ...

and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC *

* H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (native decoder, encoding through

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 ...

) * H.265/HEVC since 2014-02-12 * Huffyuv * id Software RoQ Video * Intel Indeo (decoding only) * ISO/IEC/ITU-T

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

image standards:

, JPEG-LS and

JPEG 2000 JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president), with the intention of superseding the ...

Lagarith Lagarith is an open source lossless video codec written by Ben Greenwood. It is a fork of the code of HuffYUV and offers better compression at the cost of greatly reduced speed on uniprocessor systems. Lagarith was designed and written with a fe ...

(decoding only) * LOCO (decoding only) *

DVD Forum The DVD Forum is an international organization composed of hardware, software, media and production companies that use and develop the DVD and formerly HD DVD formats. It was initially known as the DVD Consortium when it was founded in 1995. H ...

standards related /

Dolby Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (often shortened to Dolby Labs and known simply as Dolby) is an American company specializing in audio noise reduction, audio encoding/compression, spatial audio, and HDR imaging. Dolby licenses its technologies to ...

audio codecs: MLP (a.k.a.

TrueHD Dolby TrueHD is a lossless, multi-channel audio codec developed by Dolby Laboratories for home video, used principally in Blu-ray Disc and compatible hardware. Dolby TrueHD, along with Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) and Dolby AC-4, is one of the int ...

) and AC-3 * Mimic (decoding only) * MJPEG * MPEG-1 *

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic video coding format, coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of Lossy compression, lossy video compression and ...

H.262 H.262 or MPEG-2 Part 2 (formally known as ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2, also known as MPEG-2 Video) is a video coding format standardised and jointly maintained by ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and Inte ...

* ISO/

IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...

MPEG video standards: MPEG-1 Part 2, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC * MPEG-4 Part 2 (the format used for example by the popular DivX and Xvid codecs) *

On2 On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company (on the American Stock Exchange), founded in New York City in 1992 and headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designed video codec technology. It ...

VP8 (native decoder, encoding through libvpx) *

: Duck TrueMotion 1, Duck TrueMotion 2,

VP3 On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a (royalty-free) lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. There is no formal specification for the VP3 bits ...

, VP5,

and VP8 *

Apple ProRes Apple ProRes is a high quality, "visually lossless" lossy video compression format developed by Apple Inc. for use in post-production that supports video resolution up to 8K. It is the successor of the Apple Intermediate Codec and was introduced ...

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

QuickDraw (decoding only) *

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 ...

Audio codecs

Libav includes decoders and encoders for the following formats: * 8SVX (decoding only) * Adobe Flash Player related audio codecs: Adobe SWF ADPCM and Nellymoser Asao *

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, ...

* AC-3 * 3GPP vocoder standards: AMR-NB, AMR-WB (a.k.a. G.722.2) * ITU-T vocoder standards: G.711 μ-law, G.711 A-law,

G.721 G7 is the Group of Seven, a group of seven industrialized nations, formed by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. G7 or G.VII may also refer to: Military * G7 howitzer, a light howitzer developed by ...

(a.k.a.

G.726 G.726 is an ITU-T ADPCM speech codec standard covering the transmission of voice at rates of 16, 24, 32, and 40 kbit/s. It was introduced to supersede both G.721, which covered ADPCM at 32 kbit/s, and G.723, which described ADPCM for ...

32k),

G.722 G.722 is an ITU-T standard 7 kHz wideband audio codec operating at 48, 56 and 64 kbit/s. It was approved by ITU-T in November 1988. Technology of the codec is based on sub-band ADPCM (SB-ADPCM). The corresponding narrow-band codec based on ...

G.722.2 G7 is the Group of Seven, a group of seven industrialized nations, formed by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. G7 or G.VII may also refer to: Military * G7 howitzer, a light howitzer developed by ...

(a.k.a. AMR-WB),

G.723 G.723 is an ITU-T standard speech codec using extensions of G.721 providing voice quality covering 300 Hz to 3400 Hz using Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM) to 24 and 40 kbit/s for digital circuit multiplication equ ...

(a.k.a.

24k and 40k),

, G.729 and G.729D * Apple Lossless *

ATRAC3 Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to h ...

(decoding only) *

Cook Codec {{Unreferenced, date=April 2010 The cook codec is a lossy audio compression codec developed by RealNetworks. It is also known as Cooker, Gecko, RealAudio G2, and RealAudio 8 low bitrate (RA8LBR). Introduced in 1998, the cook codec was the first ...

(decoding only) * DTS (encoder is highly experimental) * EA ADPCM (decoding only) * E-AC-3 *

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

(24/32 bit support for decoding only) *

GSM 06.10 Full Rate (FR or GSM-FR or GSM 06.10 or sometimes simply GSM) was the first digital speech coding standard used in the GSM digital mobile phone system. It uses linear predictive coding (LPC). The bit rate of the codec is 13 kbit/s, or 1.625 bits/a ...

(native decoder, encoding through

libgsm Full Rate (FR or GSM-FR or GSM 06.10 or sometimes simply GSM) was the first digital speech coding standard used in the GSM digital mobile phone system. It uses linear predictive coding (LPC). The bit rate of the codec is 13 kbit/s, or 1.625 bits/a ...

) * GSM related voice codecs: Full Rate * Intel Music Coder (decoding only) *

Meridian Lossless Packing Meridian Lossless Packing, also known as Packed PCM (PPCM), is a lossless compression technique for PCM audio data developed by Meridian Audio, Ltd. MLP is the standard lossless compression method for DVD-Audio content (often advertised with ...

/ Dolby TrueHD (decoding only) * Monkey's Audio (decoding only) * MP2 * MP3 (native decoder, encoding through LAME) * ISO/IEC MPEG audio standards: MP1, MP2, MP3,

HE-AAC High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for lo ...

and MPEG-4 ALS *

Nellymoser Asao Codec in Flash Asao (also known as Nellymoser audio codec) is a proprietary single-channel (mono) codec and compression format optimized for low-bitrate transmission of sound, audio, developed by Nellymoser, Nellymoser Inc. Technical Details Sound data is gro ...

* NTT:

TwinVQ TwinVQ (transform-domain weighted interleave vector quantization) is an audio compression technique developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) Human Interface Laboratories (now Cyber Space Laboratories) in 1994. The compression ...

* Opus (via libopus) * QCELP (decoding only) * QDM2 (decoding only) *

related audio codecs:

QDesign QDesign Corporation was a developer of digital audio compression technologies. The company's MP2 and MP3 technologies were used in professional audio and broadcast automation systems as well as multimedia and video production systems. QDesign dev ...

Music Codec 2 and ALAC * RealAudio 1.0 * RealAudio 2.0 (decoding only) * RealPlayer related audio codecs: RealAudio 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 (a.k.a. ralf for RealAudioLosslessFormat) * RealPlayer related voice codecs: RealAudio 1, 2 (variant of

G.728 G.728 is an ITU-T standard for speech coding operating at 16 kbit/s. It is officially described as ''Coding of speech at 16 kbit/s using low-delay code excited linear prediction''. Technology used is LD-CELP, low-delay code excited linear pre ...

), 4 and 5 * Shorten (decoding only) * SMPTE audio standards: SMPTE 302M * Sony: ATRAC1 and

* Speex (via libspeex) *

Truespeech Truespeech is a proprietary audio codec produced by the DSP Group. It is designed for encoding voice data at low bitrates (8.5kbps for 8kHz samples), and to be embedded into DSP chips. Truespeech had been integrated into Windows Media Player in old ...

TTA TTA may refer to *Tan Tan Airport, Morocco, IATA code *Teacher Training Agency, former name of the Training and Development Agency for Schools, England * Technical Theatre Awards, UK *Terran Trade Authority, the setting for a series of science-fict ...

(decoding only) *

(decoding only) * Vorbis * WavPack (decoding only) * Windows Media Audio 1 * Windows Media Audio 2 * Windows Media Audio 9 Professional (decoding only) * Windows Media Audio Voice (decoding only) * Windows Media Player related audio codecs: WMA1, WMA2, WMA Pro, and WMA Lossless * Windows Media Player related voice codecs: WMA Voice and MS-GSM

Supported file formats

Additionally to the aforementioned codecs, Libav also supports several

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

s (file formats designed to contain audio and/or video data and subtitles, are called " containers", but that is just a special denomination.): * 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 ...

* GXF, General eXchange Format, SMPTE 360M *

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 ...

* RL2 * ISO base media file format (including

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 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 * NUV ( MythTV NuppelVideo file format) *

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 * TXD * WTV * WebP

Supported protocols

Support for several communications protocols is also contained in Libav. Here is a list: * IETF standards:

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 ...

, UDP, Gopher, HTTP, RTP, RTSP and SDP * Apple related protocols: HTTP Live Streaming * RealMedia related protocols: RealMedia RTSP/ RDT * Adobe related protocols: RTMP, RTMPT (via librtmp), RTMPE (via librtmp), RTMPTE (via librtmp) and RTMPS (via librtmp) * Microsoft related protocols:

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 and MMS over HTTP

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://libav.org 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 Video libraries Software that uses FFmpeg

History

Fork from FFmpeg

Confusion

Software using Libav instead of FFmpeg

Legal aspects

Codecs

Logo

Google Summer of Code participation

Technical details

Components

Contained codecs

Video codecs

Audio codecs

Supported file formats

Supported protocols

See also

References

External links