FFmpeg is popular multimedia framework, that allows users 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. It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffserver, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding, streaming and playing. It is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
FFmpeg security is a high priority and code review is always done with security in mind. Though due to the very large amounts of code touching untrusted data security issues are unavoidable and thus developers provide as quick as possible updates to last stable releases when new security issues are found.
Since "Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty" FFmpeg is dropped and its fork adopted 'libav' which made a lot of application unusable under Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic/14.04 Trusty. In coming release '15.04' Ubuntu team decided to add FFmpeg again to its repositories, so there won't be such issues like we have with 14.04/14.10 but there are unofficial FFmpeg PPAs available for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic/14.04 Trusty. Now unusable applications can be used again on Ubuntu 14.10/14.04 using FFmpeg and if you want to use FFmpeg from command line then follow this official documentation.

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FFmpeg offers following functionality with libs:
  • libavutil is a library containing functions for simplifying programming, including random number generators, data structures, mathematics routines, core multimedia utilities, and much more.
  • libavcodec is a library containing decoders and encoders for audio/video codecs.
  • libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for multimedia container formats.
  • libavdevice is a library containing input and output devices for grabbing from and rendering to many common multimedia input/output software frameworks, including Video4Linux, Video4Linux2, VfW, and ALSA.
  • libavfilter is a library containing media filters.
  • libswscale is a library performing highly optimized image scaling and color space/pixel format conversion operations.
  • libswresample is a library performing highly optimized audio resampling, rematrixing and sample format conversion operations.

You can also follow this guide to build from source.

There are two unofficial PPAs available to install FFmpeg in Ubuntu 14.10/14.04. A PPA by Kyrill offers packages for 14.10 Utopic and 14.04 Trusty/Linux Mint 17.1/17
To install FFmpeg in Ubuntu/Linux Mint open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following commands in the Terminal:

Another PPA offers FFmpeg packages for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty and 12.04 Precise/Linux Mint 17.1/17/13 (This PPA is also promoted on official FFmpeg website)
To install FFmpeg in Ubuntu/Linux Mint open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following commands in the Terminal:
Note: This PPA is removed and now you cannot install ffmpeg with above PPA.
That's it
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