What FFmpeg is

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge, no matter if these formats were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, platforms and configurations. FFmpeg provides the libraries libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample to be used by applications as well as the command line tools ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe for direct use.

Who the users of FFmpeg are

The FFmpeg libraries are utilized by various applications and services affecting the daily multimedia experience of countless end-users. Among these are media players like VLC and MPlayer, browsers including Chromium and Firefox, social media services from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Vimeo. Also a large user base uses the provided command line tools to directly record, manipulate and play media in all the many ways FFmpeg has to offer. If digital multimedia is part of your daily life chances are high that you are already part of the huge group of people who benefit from the FFmpeg project.

How your contribution might fit in

As an interested student you will have the chance to dive into a highly technical environment and demonstrate the necessary skills to develop software at a high level in terms of code quality, maintainability and security. Having a mentor on your side reduces the burdon to get you on speed working in a yet unknown codebase and community. You will be able to improve your skills, gain a lot of experience in a very interesting field and possibly contribute your own piece of a software that might have an impact on millions of users.