History
The project was started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym "Gerard Lantau"), and has been maintained by Michael Niedermayer since 2004. Many FFmpeg developers are also part of the MPlayer project. The name of the project comes from the MPEG video standards group, together with "FF" for "fast forward". The logo uses a zigzag pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding.
FFmpeg is developed under GNU/Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, AmigaOS and its heir MorphOS. Most computing platforms and microprocessor instruction set architectures are also supported, like x86 (IA-32 and x86-64), PPC (PowerPC), ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.
FFmpeg version 0.5 appeared after a long time without formal releases. FFmpeg developers still always recommend using the latest neutral build from their source code Git version control system.
There are two video codecs and one video container invented in the FFmpeg project during its development. The two video codecs are the lossless "FFV1", and the lossless and lossy Snow codec, the development of which has stalled, while its bitstream format hasn't been finalized yet, making it experimental for now (February 2011), and the multimedia container is "NUT" which is also not being actively developed anymore, but is still maintained.
On June 17, 2010, with version 0.6 FFmpeg also supports WebM and VP8.
On July 23, 2010 Jason Garrett-Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder.
On March 13, 2011 a group of FFmpeg developers decided to fork the project under the name "Libav". The event seems related to a recent issue in project management. Since then, the maintainer of FFmpeg packages for Debian and Ubuntu operating systems, being one of the group of developers who forked FFmpeg, has switched them to the fork.
Read more about this topic: FFmpeg
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Don’t give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can’t express them. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)