It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community, or a corporation.
It is also highly portable: The software compiles, runs, and passes testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.
It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale, and libswresample which can be used by applications.
As well as ffmpeg, ffserver, ffplay, and ffprobe which can be used by end-users for transcoding, streaming, and playing.
FFmpeg Tools:
ffmpeg
A command-line tool to convert multimedia files between formats
ffserver
A multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts
ffplay
A simple media player based on SDL and the FF mpeg libraries
ffprobe
A simple multimedia stream analyzer
FFmpeg Libraries for developers:
- libavutil is a library containing functions for simplifying programming, including random number generators, data structures, mathematics routines, core multimedia utilities, and much more.
- libavcodec is a library containing decoders and encoders for audio/video codecs.
- libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for multimedia container formats.
- libavdevice is a library containing input and output devices for grabbing from and rendering to many common multimedia input/output software frameworks, including Video4Linux, Video4Linux2, VfW, and ALSA.
- libavfilter is a library containing media filters.
- libswscale is a library performing highly optimized image scaling and color space/pixel format conversion operations.
- libswresample is a library performing highly optimized audio resampling, rematrixing, and sample format conversion operations.
How to Use
Download FFmpeg from the official website or FileHorse.com
Extract the ZIP archive to a folder
Add FFmpeg to the Windows system PATH
Open Command Prompt to check FFmpeg version
Use commands to convert or process media files
System Requirements
- OS: Windows 7 or later (64-bit recommended)
- CPU: Intel or AMD processor with SSE2 support
- RAM: Minimum 2 GB (4 GB or more recommended)
- Storage: At least 100 MB free space
- GPU: Not required but helps with hardware acceleration
PROS
- Supports a wide range of formats
- Completely free and open-source
- Powerful command-line interface
- Cross-platform compatibility
- Regular updates and active support
CONS
- No official graphical interface
- Complex commands for basic tasks
- Limited documentation for some features
- Requires manual setup and config
Note: Use 7-Zip program to unpack the archive.