FFmpeg

FFmpeg is the world's most comprehensive open-source multimedia framework, capable of decoding, encoding, transcoding, muxing, demuxing, streaming, filtering, and playing virtually any audio and video format that has ever existed. Created in 2000 by Fabrice Bellard (who also created QEMU and the TCC compiler), FFmpeg is now maintained by a large community of developers led by Michael Niedermayer and is used as the underlying multimedia engine by virtually every major media application and platform, including VLC media player, Google Chrome, OBS Studio, HandBrake, Plex, Kodi, Audacity, Blender, Premiere Pro (via plugins), and thousands of mobile and desktop apps. The project consists of several key components: ffmpeg command-line tool for format conversion and processing, ffplay a simple media player, ffprobe for analyzing media streams and metadata, and a set of powerful libraries including libavcodec (codec library supporting H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1, VP9, AAC, MP3, Opus, FLAC, and hundreds of other codecs), libavformat (container muxing and demuxing for MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV, FLV, WebM, HLS, DASH), libavfilter (filtering pipeline for video and audio effects), libavdevice (input/output device capture), libswscale (video scaling and color space conversion), libswresample (audio resampling and channel layout conversion), and libavutil (utility functions). FFmpeg supports hardware acceleration through VAAPI, VDPAU, NVENC/NVDEC (NVIDIA), AMF (AMD), VideoToolbox (macOS), MediaCodec (Android), and QSV (Intel QuickSync). The current release is version 7.1, licensed under LGPL 2.1 (or GPL 2.0+ when compiled with GPL components like x264/x265). FFmpeg processes billions of media files daily on platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, TikTok, and Facebook.