ffmpeg-libav-tutorial

This is a written tutorial that teaches you how to use FFmpeg as a programming library rather than as a command-line tool. FFmpeg is a widely used open source program for working with video and audio: converting formats, extracting frames, adjusting quality, and streaming. Most people interact with it through terminal commands, but FFmpeg also exposes a set of C libraries (collectively called libav) that programmers can call directly from their own code.

The tutorial starts from first principles, explaining what video actually is (a sequence of images displayed fast enough to create the illusion of motion), what audio is at the signal level, what a codec does (compresses raw data so files are not enormous), and what a container is (a file format like MP4 or WebM that bundles video and audio streams together). It then walks through common FFmpeg command-line operations before moving into C code.

The programming chapters cover reading media files, decoding frames, syncing audio and video timing, remuxing (changing a file's container without re-encoding the content), and transcoding (converting between codecs). Each chapter builds on the last with working code examples and explanations of the internal structures FFmpeg uses.

The tutorial is written in C, but the author notes that the concepts apply to any language that has FFmpeg bindings, and many do. Translations of the tutorial are available in Simplified Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Russian.

The intended audience is programmers who already have some coding experience and want to understand how media processing works at the library level, not just the command-line level. The full README is longer than what was shown.