FFmpeg is a computer program that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. FFmpeg is a command line tool that is composed of a collection of free software / open source libraries. It includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, and libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library. The name of the project comes from the MPEG video standards group, together with “FF” for “fast forward”. The logo uses a zigzag pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding.

The project was started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym “Gerard Lantau”), and is now maintained by Michael Niedermayer. Many FFmpeg developers are also part of the MPlayer project, and FFmpeg is hosted at the MPlayer project server.

FFmpeg is developed under GNU/Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Apple Inc. Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and AmigaOS. Most computing platforms and microprocessor instruction set architecture are also supported, like x86 (IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS architecture.

Recently version .5 of FFmpeg was released, although previously FFmpeg developers have always recommended using the latest neutral build from their source code Subversion version control system as development attempts to maintain a stable trunk.[4] Published under the GNU Lesser General Public License or GNU General Public License (depending on which sub-libraries one would include), FFmpeg is free software.

It has been so long since the last release that this 0.5 release should be considered the first FFmpeg release of recent times. Because of the way things have unfolded to date, the notes for this version cannot be entirely conventional. In the next release, it is intended to remove a number of deprecated APIs. We decided to put out a release that includes said APIs for the benefit of third party software. As such, this release: – provides a sync point for said APIs – increases awareness of API changes – allows the next release to detail how to transition from the old to the new The deprecated APIs to be removed are: – imgconvert (to be replaced by libswscale) – vhook (to be replaced by libavfilter)

Take a look at Ankoder, it is a hosted ffmpeg alternative video transcoder. It has more video encoding features then traditional FFMpeg hosting.