It can be downloaded from the FFmpeg website or through most package managers.įFmpeg is a powerful tool that can do almost anything you can imagine with multimedia files. It's available on many different operating systems and is included in some operating systems by default. In this article I'll be using FFmpeg through the command-line tool ffmpeg, which is only a single, small piece of the FFmpeg project. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the Moving Picture Experts Group or the myriad multimedia formats it has created. It's often used behind the scenes in many other media-related projects.
Enter FFmpeg.įFmpeg is a collection of different projects for handling multimedia files. Tools like Audacity or Handbrake are fantastic, but sometimes you just want to change a file from one format into another quickly. There are many open source tools out there for editing, tweaking, and converting multimedia into exactly what you need.