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FFmpeg

A complete cross-platform multimedia framework.

FFmpeg is a suite of libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, libavfilter, libavutil, libswscale, libswresample) plus command-line tools (ffmpeg, ffprobe, ffplay) that decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, filter, stream, and analyse virtually every audio and video format in use. It is the engine behind a huge fraction of the world's media tooling, including VLC, OBS Studio, mpv, Handbrake, Plex, Jellyfin, YouTube's ingestion pipeline, and many cloud video services.

The breadth of format support is unrivalled. FFmpeg understands not just modern formats (H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9, Opus, AAC) but also obscure or legacy codecs that other tools cannot handle. Filtering through libavfilter covers colour conversion, deinterlacing, resampling, mixing, denoising, and many other operations, with a graph-based command-line syntax that lets users compose complex transformations in a single command.

Fabrice Bellard, who also wrote QEMU and several other major projects, started FFmpeg in 2000. The project has had occasional governance disputes (the libav fork around 2011 split development for several years before largely converging again). FFmpeg is dual-licensed under LGPL-2.1+ and GPL-2.0+ with optional GPL components, which lets users choose based on the licensing constraints of their downstream project.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ffmpeg
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install ffmpeg-free   # full ffmpeg from RPM Fusion
Arch:          sudo pacman -S ffmpeg
macOS:         brew install ffmpeg