FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a free, open-source software project consisting of a vast suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. Created by Fabrice Bellard in 2000 and now maintained by Michael Niedermayer and a global community of contributors, FFmpeg is the most comprehensive multimedia framework available, used by VLC, Chrome, Firefox, OBS Studio, HandBrake, Plex, Jellyfin, and countless other applications for encoding, decoding, transcoding, muxing, demuxing, streaming, filtering, and playing virtually all known multimedia formats. FFmpeg consists of several core components: ffmpeg (the command-line tool for transcoding multimedia files), ffprobe (for analyzing and inspecting media streams), ffplay (a simple media player), and libraries including libavcodec (the codec library supporting over 400 codecs including H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1, VP9, AAC, MP3, Opus, FLAC, and many proprietary formats), libavformat (container format support for MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV, FLV, WebM, HLS, DASH, and over 150 formats), libavfilter (a powerful filter graph system for video and audio processing including scaling, cropping, overlay, color correction, deinterlacing, denoising, subtitles, audio mixing, and hundreds of other effects), libswscale (video scaling and color space conversion with MMX, SSE, and AVX optimization), libswresample (audio resampling, rematrixing, and sample format conversion), and libavdevice (capturing from and rendering to hardware devices). FFmpeg supports GPU acceleration via NVIDIA NVENC/NVDEC, Intel QSV, AMD AMF, VideoToolbox, and VAAPI. FFmpeg is used by YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, and virtually every major video platform.