In praise of ffmpeg
My last “In praise of” article covered qemu, a project founded by Fabrice Bellard, and today I want to take a look at another work by Bellard: ffmpeg. Bellard has a knack for building high-quality software which solves a problem so well that every other solution becomes obsolete shortly thereafter, and ffmpeg is no exception.
ffmpeg has been described as the Swiss army knife of multimedia. It incorporates hundreds of video, audio, and image decoders and encoders, muxers and demuxers, filters and devices. It provides a CLI and a set of libraries for working with its tools, and is the core component of many video and audio players as a result (including my preferred multimedia player, mpv). If you want to do almost anything with multimedia files — re-encode them, re-mux them, live stream it, whatever — ffmpeg can handle it with ease.
Let me share an example.