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Translator and Editor: Alex
Technical proofreader: Zhao Jun
This article is from OTTVerse by Krishna Rao Vijayanagar.
Easy-Tech#017#——FFmpeg
FFmpeg is an open source software for generating various libraries and programs for processing multimedia data. FFmpeg can transcode, process videos and pictures (resize, resize, denoise, etc.), package, transfer and play videos. As the most popular video and image processing software, it is widely used by different companies from all walks of life.
Reviewer's Note: The FFmpeg project was founded by Fabrice Bellard in 2000 and has evolved over 21 years so far. The FFmpeg community interacts frequently with other multimedia projects, which is one of the reasons for its success. At the beginning of its establishment, many developers were active in the Mplayer project at the same time. So far, the developers of the FFmpeg project still have extensive overlap with multimedia open source projects such as VLC, MPV, dav1d, and x264. After 2004, the FFmpeg community was basically led by Michael Niedermayer.
In this article, I'll take you through a quick introduction to FFmpeg and the amazing uses of this software, and we'll cover more about FFmpeg in future articles.
How to install FFmpeg?
Installing FFmpeg is super easy. If you're on Windows, you can download the latest FFmpeg executable here:
https://ottverse.com/ffmpeg-builds/
This page is updated every Wednesday with the latest FFmpeg version.
If you're on a Mac, you can install it using the homebrew command. And Linux systems can be easily installed using the apt package manager.
If you're in a hurry, you can use this Mac install command from homebrew:
brew install ffmpeg
Linux is installed using the apt package manager:
sudo apt install ffmpeg
Of course, you can also download the FFmpeg source code and configure from scratch the codec you want to use. In doing so, you can have a mini version of FFmpeg that suits you.
Reviewer's Note: The documentation of the FFmpeg community is relatively rich. If you need to customize and compile FFmpeg yourself, https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide is a very good place to start.
What is FFmpeg used for?
This is a great question, but also a very difficult one to answer. Because FFmpeg is constantly adding new use cases, tools and features, this can extend FFmpeg to countless uses.
Here are a few main uses of FFmpeg:
video processing
FFmpeg can be used for various video processing tasks, such as denoising, blurring video, color conversion, video rotation, extracting frames, scaling video size, etc. These tasks are critical for most video processing, compression, and delivery.
We will cover these features in more articles in the future.
Use FFmpeg to stack videos
video compression
FFmpeg's support for video compression is fantastic, and it's an open secret that many streaming companies use FFmpeg in their video production systems. Because it is really very stable!
FFmpeg is included for various codecs [such as JPEG, MPEG-1/2/4, H263+AAC (MPEG), Theora (Ogg Vorbis), AVS+, VP8 (WebM), H.264/AVC, HEVC, AV1, etc. ] Libraries that provide interfaces that you can use to compress, transcode, or decode video as needed.
Support video packaging
For OTT system manufacturers and developers, FFmpeg also fully supports packaging video using HLS and MPEG-DASH, and it can also be configured to transmit video using RTMP or other protocols.
Supports audio and video container formats
FFmpeg also widely supports various container formats and can be used to read, write and convert various container formats, such as avi, mp4, mp3, wma, wav, ts, flv, mkv and many other unknown formats.
ffprobe
FFmpeg can also be used to understand video structure and analyze it. The FFmpeg library builds a command line called ffprobe that can be used to view and analyze video files. You can use ffprobe to extract various metadata from the video, count frames, find the position of IDR frames, and more. The power of ffprobe will be covered in detail in future articles.
ffplay
Finally, there is also a command-line tool ffplay in FFmpeg to play videos, which can play videos directly without any fancy video playback software.
Why is FFmpeg so popular?
Many companies use FFmpeg, mainly because of its open source nature (meaning that anyone can modify it), making it ideal for scaling into different systems with various hardware specifications (such as Android devices of all shapes, sizes, and specifications) .
FFmpeg can be found in the repositories of most Linux distributions and can be installed on all major desktop operating systems. FFmpeg is designed to help users handle the widest range of media formats with the least effort. So if you're looking for a great way to convert FLAC files to MP3, this is it!
Epilogue
FFmpeg is a very powerful library in the video processing and compression toolbox. It has a lot of features and is open source, you can also modify the source code and extend its functionality. If you want to learn more about FFmpeg, you can look forward to follow-up articles.
Thanks:
This article has been translated and published with permission from the author, Krishna Rao Vijayanagar, thanks.
Original link: https://ottverse.com/what-is-ffmpeg-installation-use-cases/
