What is "ffmpeg"

FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. FFmpeg includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line program for transcoding multimedia files. FFmpeg is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1+ or GNU General Public License 2+ (depending on which options are enabled).

FFmpeg is developed mostly on Linux, but can be compiled under most operating systems, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS, as well as AmigaOS and MorphOS. Most computing platforms and microprocessor instruction set architectures are also supported, like x86 ( IA-32 and x86-64), PPC ( PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.

The name of the project is inspired by the MPEG video standards group, together with "FF" for "fast forward". The logo uses a zigzag pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding.