FFmpeg User Guide

General FFmpeg Usage

1. Introduction to FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a collection of open-source multimedia processing tools and libraries. It can parse, convert, encode, decode, filter, mux, and transmit video, audio, subtitles, and metadata.

Common FFmpeg command-line tools include:

Tool	Purpose
ffmpeg	Transcoding, remuxing, capture, filtering, and streaming
ffprobe	Inspecting media containers, streams, frames, and metadata
ffplay	A simple player for testing and debugging

The main libraries are:

Library	Purpose
libavcodec	Video and audio encoding and decoding
libavformat	Media containers, demuxing, muxing, and network protocols
libavfilter	Audio and video filter graphs
libavutil	Pixel formats, time bases, data structures, and common utilities
libswscale	Software image scaling and pixel-format conversion
libswresample	Audio resampling, channel conversion, and mixing
libavdevice	Input and output for cameras, sound devices, and displays

An FFmpeg processing pipeline can be simplified as follows:

Input file / camera / network stream
                │
                ▼
             Demuxing
                │
                ▼
              Decoding
                │
                ▼
         Video or audio filters
                │
                ▼
              Encoding
                │
                ▼
              Muxing
                │
                ▼
       Output file / network stream

Remuxing skips decoding, filtering, and encoding, and directly copies the compressed streams. It is fast and does not reduce media quality.