The Creative Design Blog

The only open source video transcoder is ffmpeg. The “FF” in the name means fast forward and MPEG is a video standards group. It is a collection of libraries that include libavcodec, x264, theora and a bunch other audio/video codecs. You can control the program by commandline to stream, convert and record all types of video formats.

There are many other open source projects based on FFmpeg. A very popular video player on linux is MPlayer. The project is now maintained by a large group of open source and video enthusiasts.

Like most open source projects FFmpeg suffers from a certain lack of manpower. For this reason the developers have to prioritize the work they do and putting out releases is not at the top of the list, fixing bugs and reviewing patches takes precedence. Please don’t complain or request more timely and/or frequent releases unless you are willing to help out creating them.

Recently version .5 of FFmpeg was released, although previously FFmpeg developers have always recommended using the latest neutral build from their source code Subversion version control system as development attempts to maintain a stable trunk.[4] Published under the GNU Lesser General Public License or GNU General Public License (depending on which sub-libraries one would include), FFmpeg is free software.

It has been so long since the last release that this 0.5 release should be considered the first FFmpeg release of recent times. Because of the way things have unfolded to date, the notes for this version cannot be entirely conventional. In the next release, it is intended to remove a number of deprecated APIs. We decided to put out a release that includes said APIs for the benefit of third party software. As such, this release: – provides a sync point for said APIs – increases awareness of API changes – allows the next release to detail how to transition from the old to the new The deprecated APIs to be removed are: – imgconvert (to be replaced by libswscale) – vhook (to be replaced by libavfilter)

Take a look at Ankoder, it is a hosted ffmpeg alternative video transcoder. It has more video encoding features then traditional FFMpeg hosting.