FFmpeg的名称来自MPEG视频编码标准，前面的“FF”代表“Fast Forward”，FFmpeg是一套可以用来记录、转换数字音频、视频，并能将其转化为流的开源计算机程序。可以轻易地实现多种视频格式之间的相互转换。
FFmpeg是一套可以用来记录、转换数字音频、视频，并能将其转化为流的开源计算机程序。采用LGPL或GPL许可证。它提供了录制、转换以及流化音视频的完整解决方案。它包含了非常先进的音频/视频编解码库libavcodec，为了保证高可移植性和编解码质量，libavcodec里很多code都是从头开发的。
FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.
It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding and playing.
FFmpeg Libraries for developers
libavutil is a library containing functions for simplifying programming, including random number generators, data structures, mathematics routines, core multimedia utilities, and much more.
libavcodec is a library containing decoders and encoders for audio/video codecs.
libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for multimedia container formats.
libavdevice is a library containing input and output devices for grabbing from and rendering to many common multimedia input/output software frameworks, including Video4Linux, Video4Linux2, VfW, and ALSA.
libavfilter is a library containing media filters.
libswscale is a library performing highly optimized image scaling and color space/pixel format conversion operations.
libswresample is a library performing highly optimized audio resampling, rematrixing and sample format conversion operations.
FFmpeg是一套可以用来记录、转换数字音频、视频，并能将其转化为流的开源计算机程序。它包括了领先的音/视频编码库libavcodec等。
libavformat：用于各种音视频封装格式的生成和解析，包括获取解码所需信息以生成解码上下文结构
和读取音视频帧等功能；
libavcodec：用于各种类型声音/图像编解码；
libavutil：包含一些公共的工具函数；
libswscale：用于视频场景比例缩放、色彩映射转换；
libpostproc：用于后期效果处理；
ffmpeg：该项目提供的一个工具，可用于格式转换、解码或电视卡即时编码等；
ffsever：一个 HTTP 多媒体即时广播串流服务器；
ffplay：是一个简单的播放器，使用ffmpeg 库解析和解码，通过SDL显示；