FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. 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 contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, 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

The FFmpeg project tries to provide the best technically possible solution for developers of applications and end users alike. To achieve this we combine the best free software options available. We slightly favor our own code to keep the dependencies on other libs low and to maximize code sharing between parts of FFmpeg. Wherever the question of "best" cannot be answered we support both options so the end user can choose.

Security is a high priority and code review is always done with security in mind. Though due to the very large amounts of code touching untrusted data security issues are unavoidable and thus we provide as quick as possible updates to our last stable releases when new security issues are found.