FFmpeg is free, cross-platform software that converts, edits, compresses and streams media. If you have ever watched a video that changed format, size or quality on its way to your screen, there is a good chance FFmpeg — or one of the countless apps built on it — did the work.
FFmpeg serves three quite different audiences at once, which is easy to miss on a project this technical. Pick the one that's you.
A single command-line tool, also called ffmpeg, that converts a media
file between formats, trims it, resizes it, pulls out the audio, or does dozens of
other jobs from a terminal.
Seven libraries — for decoding, encoding, container formats, filters, scaling and resampling — that other applications, browsers and streaming services build on directly.
FFmpeg is free software under the LGPL (and the GPL for some optional parts), with real conditions attached to redistributing it. Know them before you ship.
FFmpeg ships real, frequent releases, but the official notes are written for people who already know the codebase. Here are the last two major releases translated for everyone else — the full technical changelog stays on the project's own site, unedited.
A maintenance release. The headline change is under the hood: several video effects that use the graphics card (via Vulkan) no longer need to compile shader code every time they start, so they begin working faster. It also adds support for reading metadata tucked inside photo files (EXIF) and a new way to decode a surround-sound audio format used by some streaming services.
A major release, and one of the largest in the project's history. It adds support for several new video and audio formats used by cameras and streaming platforms, and introduces a new way of doing video encoding and decoding directly on the graphics card that doesn't depend on any one manufacturer's hardware — a change aimed squarely at video editors and screen-recording software that need speed without giving up quality.
FFmpeg itself only publishes source code — everything else below is a real, current way people actually get a working copy.
Most Linux distributions package it. On Debian or Ubuntu:
sudo apt install ffmpegFFmpeg only ships source, so both platforms rely on community-maintained builds. The project's own download page keeps the current, trusted list for each.
The canonical source, straight from the project's own git server:
git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.gitFFmpeg is a volunteer project with no company behind it. Its only legal home is a fiscal sponsor, and its only real "location" is wherever its contributors and mailing lists are. See how to actually reach people →