Libav

Libav is an abandoned free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that contains libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The Libav project was a fork of the FFmpeg project. It was announced on March 13, 2011 by a group of FFmpeg developers. The event was related to an issue in project management and different goals: FFmpeg supporters wanted to keep development velocity in favour of more features, while Libav supporters and developers wanted to improve the state of the code and take the time to design better APIs. The maintainer of the FFmpeg packages for Debian and Ubuntu, being one of the group of developers who forked FFmpeg, switched the packages to this fork in 2011. Hence, most software on these systems that depended on FFmpeg automatically switched to Libav. On July 8, 2015, Debian announced it would return to FFmpeg for various, technical reasons. Several arguments justified this step. Firstly, FFmpeg had a better record of responding to vulnerabilities than Libav. Secondly, Mateusz "j00ru" Jurczyk, a security-oriented developer at Google, argued that all issues he found in FFmpeg were fixed in a timely manner, while Libav was still affected by various bugs. Finally, FFmpeg supported a far wider variety of codecs and containers than Libav. Libav is an abandoned software project, with Libav developers either returning to FFmpeg, moving to other multimedia projects like the AV1 video codec, or leaving the multimedia field entirely. At the beginning of this fork, Libav and FFmpeg separately developed their own versions of the ffmpeg command. Libav then renamed their ffmpeg to avconv to distance themselves from the FFmpeg project. During the transition period, when a Libav user typed ffmpeg, there was a message telling the user that the ffmpeg command was deprecated and avconv has to be used instead. This confused some users into thinking that FFmpeg (the project) was dead. This message was removed upstream when ffmpeg was finally removed from the Libav sources. In June 2012, on Ubuntu 12.