Libav

Libav is a free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. Libav is developed for many operating systems, including GNU/Linux, the BSDs, OS X, Microsoft Windows, AmigaOS and its heir MorphOS. It supports most common instruction set architectures, including IA-32, x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, DEC Alpha, SPARC, and MIPS.

History

Fork from FFmpeg

The Libav project is a fork of the FFmpeg project which was originally started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym "Gérard Lantau"). The Libav project 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 wanted to improve the state of the code, 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. In July 8, 2015, Debian announced it would return to FFmpeg for various, technical reasons. Several arguments justified this step. FFmpeg first 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 were fixed in a timely manner, and the situation was entirely different with Libav still affected by a bunch of bugs. Finally, the feature gap between FFmpeg and Libav, with FFmpeg supporting a far wider variety of codecs and containers than Libav does.