Introduction

This website contains an expansive set of resources for learning about and using FFmpeg.

What is FFmpeg?

FFmpeg is a free and open-source project consisting of a vast software suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams.

At its core is the FFmpeg program itself, designed for command-line-based processing of video and audio files, and widely used for format transcoding, basic editing (trimming and concatenation), video scaling, video post-production effects, and standards compliance (SMPTE, ITU).

FFmpeg includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by many commercial and free software products, libavformat (Lavf), an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the core 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).

What is FFmpeg used for?

FFmpeg is used by software such as VLC media player, xine, Cinelerra-GG video editor, Plex, Kodi, Blender, HandBrake, YouTube, and MPC-HC; it handles video and audio playback in Google Chrome, and Linux version of Firefox.

FFmpeg is also used in video editing software, such as Shotcut, OpenShot, Kdenlive, Flowblade, Olive, Pitivi, and Lightworks, and video players such as mpv, MPlayer, and VLC media player. FFmpeg can be used along with VP9 and Vorbis libraries for building the HTML5 video player for the Wikimedia Foundation as of 2013.

Get started

Follow our in-depth guides to get started with FFmpeg. Then, learn about some common tasks and how they can be accomplished.