FFmpeg README

August 8, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

FFmpeg is a collection of libraries and tools to process multimedia content such as audio, video, subtitles and related metadata.

Libraries

  • libavcodec provides implementation of a wider range of codecs.
  • libavformat implements streaming protocols, container formats and basic I/O access.
  • libavutil includes hashers, decompressors and miscellaneous utility functions.
  • libavfilter provides means to alter decoded audio and video through a directed graph of connected filters.
  • libavdevice provides an abstraction to access capture and playback devices.
  • libswresample implements audio mixing and resampling routines.
  • libswscale implements color conversion and scaling routines.

Tools

  • ffmpeg is a command line toolbox to manipulate, convert and stream multimedia content.
  • ffplay is a minimalistic multimedia player.
  • ffprobe is a simple analysis tool to inspect multimedia content.
  • Additional small tools such as aviocat, ismindex and qt-faststart.

Documentation

The offline documentation is available in the doc/ directory.

The online documentation is available in the main website and in the wiki.

Examples

Coding examples are available in the doc/examples directory.

License

FFmpeg codebase is mainly LGPL-licensed with optional components licensed under GPL. Please refer to the LICENSE file for detailed information.

Contributing

Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.

SIXEL Integration

ballmer

Step 0. Edit .Xresources

$ cat $HOME/.Xresources
XTerm*decTerminalID: vt340
XTerm*sixelScrolling: true
XTerm*regisScreenSize: 1920x1080
XTerm*numColorRegisters: 256

$ xrdb $HOME/.Xresources  # reload

Step 1. Build xterm with --enable-sixel-graphics option

$ wget ftp://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf xterm.tar.gz
$ cd xterm-*
$ ./configure --enable-sixel-graphics
$ make
$ ./xterm  # launch

Step 2. Build FFmpeg-SIXEL with libsixel

$ git clone https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel
$ cd libsixel
$ ./configure && make && make install
$ cd ..
$ git clone https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL
$ cd FFmpeg-SIXEL
$ ./configure --enable-libsixel
$ make
$ ./ffmpeg -i a.webm -f sixel -pix_fmt rgb24 -reqcolors 256 -s 600x360 -loglevel panic -