FFmpeg Multimedia Framework

FFmpeg is the leading open-source multimedia framework capable of decoding, encoding, transcoding, muxing, demuxing, streaming, filtering, and playing virtually any audio and video format ever created. Maintained by a global community of developers since 2000, it serves as the foundational library for thousands of video processing applications including VLC, OBS Studio, HandBrake, Blender, Plex, and countless commercial media products. The project consists of three core components: the command-line tool for format conversion and processing, the FFserver streaming server, and the libavcodec, libavformat, libavutil, libswscale, and libavfilter libraries that developers integrate into their own applications. It supports an enormous range of codecs including H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9, AAC, Opus, and hundreds of legacy and niche formats. Advanced capabilities include hardware acceleration through CUDA, NVENC, NVDEC, VAAPI, VideoToolbox, and Media Foundation, enabling GPU-accelerated encoding and decoding for dramatically improved performance. The framework handles live streaming via RTMP, HLS, DASH, and SRT protocols, supports complex filter graphs for audio and video manipulation, and provides frame-accurate seeking and cutting. Recent releases have added IAMF immersive audio support, Vulkan compute codecs, D3D12 hardware acceleration, and improvements to the av1 encoder. The project is used by major broadcasters, streaming platforms, video conferencing tools, and content creators worldwide, processing billions of hours of media annually.