Some containers are highly advanced and allow for any sort of stream, including multiple video and audio streams inside a single container. It presents a single interface that media players and tools can interact with. The container is the wrapper for the streams. Neither is inherently better than the other, as each is trying to do different things. This means a FLAC-formatted file will be much larger than a Vorbis audio stream but should sound better. For example, the FLAC codec is good for high-quality lossless audio, whereas Vorbis is designed to compete with MP3 in file size while offering better audio quality. Each codec has its own properties, strengths, and weaknesses. The streams include the actual AV components, such as a movie's audio or video, and are encoded using a particular media encoding, or codec. Media filesĪt a very high-level view, a media file is broken up into a container and its streams. Before we look at using FFmpeg, first we need to take a quick look at what a media file exactly is. In this article, we are interested in using it to convert files, so we won't be taking a deep dive into its entire feature set. It can be downloaded from the FFmpeg website or through most package managers.įFmpeg is a powerful tool that can do almost anything you can imagine with multimedia files. It's available on many different operating systems and is included in some operating systems by default. In this article I'll be using FFmpeg through the command-line tool ffmpeg, which is only a single, small piece of the FFmpeg project. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the Moving Picture Experts Group or the myriad multimedia formats it has created. It's often used behind the scenes in many other media-related projects. Enter FFmpeg.įFmpeg is a collection of different projects for handling multimedia files. Tools like Audacity or Handbrake are fantastic, but sometimes you just want to change a file from one format into another quickly. There are many open source tools out there for editing, tweaking, and converting multimedia into exactly what you need. Nevertheless, it is considered the leading framework when it comes to encoding, decoding and other common multimedia processing options. A top framework for managing multimediaĪlthough it is a base for renowned media converters and is widely popular, FFmpeg is not a tool the average user will choose normally due to the fact that it uses commands and a rather steep learning curve. Then again, there are numerous third-party programs out there that provide an interface and hence, could allow you to take advantage of this great app. If you’re wondering why the tool is not used by everyone out there, then it is because it is a console utility that relies on commands. In fact, FFmpeg packs numerous libraries specifically designed for developer, among whom we can count libavcodec, libavfilter, libavutil, libavdevice, libswresample and libswscale.
In all fairness, the framework is quite popular among developers who create or work with tools that entail multimedia processing. Packs numerous libraries suitable for developers Some of the noteworthy options include image rescalling, pixel format conversion, audio resampling, numerous encoders and decoders, bitstream filters and support for many muxer and demuxer formats, just to name a few.
The app really shines in terms of options, as it allows you to pretty much manage a media file in any way. In addition, since it is console-based, it does its job rather quickly. The trump card of the utility is that it can convert every media file out there, including the old formats and broad platform compatibility. While the first is the main tool, the others represent valuable resources for viewing the revised media and for streaming. The project consists of three tools, namely ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe. Includes three main tools and a plethora of options FFmpeg is essentially a collection of tools used to manage multiple aspects about multimedia files, including streaming, mux, encoding, filtering or transcoding.