libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. libavcodec is an integral part of many open-source multimedia applications and frameworks. The popular MPV, xine and VLC media players use it as their main, built-in decoding engine that enables playback of many audio and video formats on all supported platforms. It is also used by the ffdshow tryouts decoder as its primary decoding library. libavcodec is also used in video editing and transcoding applications like Avidemux, MEncoder or Kdenlive for both decoding and encoding. libavcodec contains decoder and sometimes encoder implementations of several proprietary formats, including ones for which no public specification has been released. As such, a significant reverse engineering effort is part of libavcodec development. Having such codecs available within the standard libavcodec framework gives a number of benefits over using the original codecs, most notably increased portability, and in some cases also better performance, since libavcodec contains a standard library of highly optimized implementations of common building blocks, such as DCT and color space conversion. However, while libavcodec does strive to achieve decoding that is bit-exact to their official format implementations, occasional bugs and missing features in such re-implementations can sometimes introduce playback compatibility problems for certain files. libavcodec includes video decoders and/or encoders for the following formats, this list is not exhaustive: Animated GIF Asus video format v1 and v2 AVS (decoding only, encoding through libxavs) AV1 CamStudio format (decoding only) CineForm (decoding only) Cinepak Creative YUV (CYUV, decoding only) Dirac DNxHD Duck Corporation Truemotion 1, 2, and RT codecs (Decoding only) FFV1 Flash Screen Video v1 and v2 H.261 H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 H.263 H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (native decoder, encoding through x264 and hardware encoding) H.
Pierre-André Farine, Sara Grassi Pauletti, Pradyumna Ayyalasomayajula