FFmpeg celebrates its 20th anniversary

The open-source codec library project FFmpeg has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. The official screenshot of the project on Twitter shows that the project was created on December 20, 2000.

This is probably as close to a 20th Birthday as we can get.

Here's to 20 more years of open source multimedia! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/SPB8x7UsrS

— FFmpeg (@FFmpeg) December 20, 2020

Of course, end-users may not be particularly familiar with FFmpeg, but almost every player we commonly use uses the source code of FFmpeg.

This project is not only used by a large number of free software but also many large companies’ commercial software such as YouTube and iTunes also use FFmpeg

Although the development progress is relatively slow due to the small number of core developers, the project is still developing at least until now after two decades of hard work.

In the past two decades, the development of the project has not been smooth sailing. In fact, a coup d’etat in FFmpeg in 2011 led to the project’s death.

The developers who launched the coup at that time believed that the division of the community was too serious and would seriously threaten the development of the project, so they had to launch a coup to control the main maintenance rights.

In the end, the project founder Fabrice Bellard chose to leave the project team, and then Fabrice Bellard and some of the developers left to create another well-known project Libav.

Now FFmpeg and Libav are almost all the necessary codec libraries for mainstream players. These codec libraries are all open source and free for commercial use without additional fees.