FFmpeg README

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.

It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding and playing.

The FFmpeg project tries to provide the best technically possible solution for developers of applications and end users alike. To achieve this we combine the best free software options available. We slightly favor our own code to keep the dependencies on other libs low and to maximize code sharing between parts of FFmpeg. Wherever the question of "best" cannot be answered we support both options so the end user can choose.

Everyone is welcome in FFmpeg and all contributions are welcome too. We are happy to receive patches, pull requests, bug reports, donations or any other type of contribution.

Security is a high priority and code review is always done with security in mind. Though due to the very large amounts of code touching untrusted data security issues are unavoidable and thus we provide as quick as possible updates to our last stable releases when new security issues are

Libraries

libavcodec provides implementation of a wider range of codecs.
libavformat implements streaming protocols, container formats and basic I/O access.
libavutil includes hashers, decompressors and miscellaneous utility functions.
libavfilter provides means to alter decoded audio and video through a directed graph of connected filters.
libavdevice provides an abstraction to access capture and playback devices.
libswresample implements audio mixing and resampling routines.
libswscale implements color conversion and scaling routines.

Tools

ffmpeg is a command line toolbox to manipulate, convert and stream multimedia content.
ffplay is a minimalistic multimedia player.
ffprobe is a simple analysis tool to inspect multimedia content.
Additional small tools such as aviocat, ismindex and qt-faststart.

Documentation

The offline documentation is available in the doc/ directory.

The online documentation is available in the main website and in the wiki.

Examples

Coding examples are available in the doc/examples directory.

License

FFmpeg codebase is mainly LGPL-licensed with optional components licensed under GPL. Please refer to the LICENSE file for detailed information.

Contributing

Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.