libav

Libav is a multimedia framework and collection of libraries and programs for processing multimedia data. It originated as a fork of FFmpeg in 2011 when a subset of FFmpeg developers left the project amid disagreements over governance and licensing. The Libav project provides a set of libraries—libavcodec, libavformat, libavutil, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale, and libswresample—that enable encoding and decoding of audio and video, format demuxing and muxing, and various processing tasks such as filtering and scaling. It also ships a suite of command-line tools, most notably avconv as an alternative to FFmpeg’s ffmpeg, as well as avprobe and avplay.

Libav is designed to be used by applications and in multimedia processing pipelines, and is compatible with a wide range of video and audio formats through its libraries. The APIs and behavior were initially intended to be similar to FFmpeg's, to ease migration, although differences emerged as the two projects diverged.

In terms of development and reception, FFmpeg became the more active and widely adopted project, while Libav’s development slowed; many distributions and users migrated back to FFmpeg or used both in different contexts. Libav remains an independent project with ongoing maintenance and occasional releases; it continues to maintain its own codebase and documentation. The Libav project is hosted at libav.org and follows open-source licenses consistent with its libraries.