FFmpeglibav

FFmpegLibav is a descriptor for the historical relationship between FFmpeg and Libav, two open-source multimedia frameworks that emerged from the same codebase. FFmpeg is a cross-platform project that provides a collection of libraries—most notably libavcodec, libavformat, libavutil, libavfilter, libswscale, and libswresample—and a suite of command-line tools such as ffmpeg, ffprobe, and ffplay. The project enables decoding, encoding, transcoding, muxing, demuxing, filtering, streaming, and playing a wide variety of audio and video formats. FFmpeg is released under a combination of LGPL and GPL licenses, depending on configuration, and is widely used in software ranging from media players to servers and mobile apps.

Libav is a fork of FFmpeg that arose in 2011 when a subset of developers diverged from FFmpeg to pursue its own design goals and governance. Libav provides a similar set of libraries (often labeled libavcodec, libavformat, libavutil, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale, libswresample) and its own command-line tool, avconv. Since its split, Libav has followed its own release cycle and API decisions, occasionally causing compatibility gaps with FFmpeg.

Current status: FFmpeg remains the more active and widely adopted project, with rapid feature development and broad platform support. Libav continues as a separate project but has seen reduced activity and attention in many distributions, which often favor FFmpeg. Both projects share a common heritage and, in practice, contribute to the multimedia processing ecosystem by supporting codec development, documentation, and cross-platform tooling.