In March 2011 some of the FFmpeg developers forked the project under the name “Libav”.
Libav is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. One of the components of libav is avconv, a fast open source video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. The command-line tool can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter.
Besides avconv, the libav-tools package offers the avplay multimedia player, the avserver streaming server, and the avprobe stream analyzer. The tooks support most existing file formats (AVI, MPEG, OGG, Matroska, ASF…) and encoding formats (MPEG, DivX, MPEG4, AC3, DV…).
Features include:
- Grabs video and audio.
- Can also grab the X11 display.
- Convert from one audio and video format to another format in real time.
- Streams several formats at several bit rates and resolutions simultaneously.
- Handles thousands of concurrent users.
- Uses the HTTP protocol to be compatible with all major players including Icecast (aka mpg123, xmms, winamp), MTV (to play streaming MPEG video and audio), “Real” compatible players and Windows Media Player.
- Allows time shifting of live streams.
- One instance can stream from multiple live encoding sources and/or multiple static files.
- avprobe tool.
- VorbisComment writing for FLAC, Ogg FLAC and Ogg Speex files.
- Video filters: blackframe, bloxblur, copy, crop, cropdetect, delogo, drawbox, drawtext, fade, fieldorder, fifo, format, frei0r, gradfun, hflip, hqdn3d, lut, lutrgb, lutyuv, negate, null, ocv, overlay, pad, pixdesctest, scale, select, setdar, setpts, setsar, settb, showinfo, slicify, transpose, unsharp, vflip, and yadif.
- Picks the “best” stream of each type present in input files and add them to each output file.
Website: libav.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Libav developers
License: GNU LGPL v2.1 or higher
avconv is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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