Having such codecs available within the standard libavcodec framework gives a number of benefits over using the original codecs, most notably increased portability, and in some cases also better performance, since libavcodec contains a standard library of highly optimized implementations of common building blocks, such as DCT and color space conversion. As such, a significant reverse engineering effort is part of libavcodec development. Libavcodec contains decoder and sometimes encoder implementations of several proprietary formats, including ones for which no public specification has been released. libavcodec is also used in video editing and transcoding applications like Avidemux, MEncoder or Kdenlive for both decoding and encoding. It is also used by the ffdshow tryouts decoder as its primary decoding library. The popular MPV, xine and VLC media players use it as their main, built-in decoding engine that enables playback of many audio and video formats on all supported platforms. Libavcodec is an integral part of many open-source multimedia applications and frameworks.
Libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.
