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

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 found.

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.

FFmpeg provides various tools:

  • ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert multimedia files between formats.
  • ffserver is a multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts.
  • ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and the FFmpeg libraries.
  • ffprobe is a is a simple multimedia stream analyzer.

and developers libraries:

  • libavutil is a library containing functions for simplifying programming, including random number generators, data structures, mathematics routines, core multimedia utilities, and much more.
  • libavcodec is a library containing decoders and encoders for audio/video codecs.
  • libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for multimedia container formats.
  • libavdevice is a library containing input and output devices for grabbing from and rendering to many common multimedia input/output software frameworks, including Video4Linux, Video4Linux2, VfW, and ALSA.
  • libavfilter is a library containing media filters.
  • libswscale is a library performing highly optimized image scaling and color space/pixel format conversion operations.
  • libswresample is a library performing highly optimized audio resampling, rematrixing and sample format conversion operations.

What's New

A new major release, FFmpeg 7.0 "Dijkstra", is now available for download. The most noteworthy changes for most users are a native VVC decoder (currently experimental, until more fuzzing is done), IAMF support, or a multi-threaded ffmpeg CLI tool.

This release is not backwards compatible, removing APIs deprecated before 6.0. The biggest change for most library callers will be the removal of the old bitmask-based channel layout API, replaced by the AVChannelLayout API allowing such features as custom channel ordering, or Ambisonics. Certain deprecated ffmpeg CLI options were also removed, and a C11-compliant compiler is now required to build the code.

version 7.0:

  • DXV DXT1 encoder
  • LEAD MCMP decoder
  • EVC decoding using external library libxevd
  • EVC encoding using external library libxeve
  • QOA decoder and demuxer
  • aap filter
  • demuxing, decoding, filtering, encoding, and muxing in the
  • ffmpeg CLI now all run in parallel
  • enable gdigrab device to grab a window using the hwnd=HANDLER syntax
  • IAMF raw demuxer and muxer
  • D3D12VA hardware accelerated H264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, MPEG-2 and VC1 decoding
  • tiltandshift filter
  • qrencode filter and qrencodesrc source
  • quirc filter
  • lavu/eval: introduce randomi() function in expressions
  • VVC decoder (experimental)
  • fsync filter
  • Raw Captions with Time (RCWT) closed caption muxer
  • ffmpeg CLI -bsf option may now be used for input as well as output
  • ffmpeg CLI options may now be used as -/opt , which is equivalent
  • to -opt >
  • showinfo bitstream filter
  • a C11-compliant compiler is now required; note that this requirement
  • will be bumped to C17 in the near future, so consider updating your
  • build environment if it lacks C17 support
  • Change the default bitrate control method from VBR to CQP for QSV encoders.
  • removed deprecated ffmpeg CLI options -psnr and -map_channel
  • DVD-Video demuxer, powered by libdvdnav and libdvdread
  • ffprobe -show_stream_groups option
  • ffprobe (with -export_side_data film_grain) now prints film grain metadata
  • AEA muxer
  • ffmpeg CLI loopback decoders
  • Support PacketTypeMetadata of PacketType in enhanced flv format
  • ffplay with hwaccel decoding support (depends on vulkan renderer via libplacebo)
  • dnn filter libtorch backend
  • Android content URIs protocol
  • AOMedia Film Grain Synthesis 1 (AFGS1)
  • RISC-V optimizations for AAC, FLAC, JPEG-2000, LPC, RV4.0, SVQ, VC1, VP8, and more
  • Loongarch optimizations for HEVC decoding
  • Important AArch64 optimizations for HEVC
  • IAMF support inside MP4/ISOBMFF
  • Support for HEIF/AVIF still images and tiled still images
  • Dolby Vision profile 10 support in AV1
  • Support for Ambient Viewing Environment metadata in MP4/ISOBMFF
  • HDR10 metadata passthrough when encoding with libx264, libx265, and libsvtav1