Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows a higher bitrate to be allocated to the more complex segments of media files while less space is allocated to less complex segments. The average of these rates can be calculated to produce an average bitrate for the file.
MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using DJGPP is also available. Versions for the Wii Homebrew Channel and Amazon Kindle have also been developed.
Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material.
Xvid is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.
FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects, and standards compliance.
VideoLAN is a non-profit organization which develops software for playing video and other media formats. It originally developed two programs for media streaming, VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN Server (VLS), but most of the features of VLS have been incorporated into VLC, with the result renamed VLC media player.
RealMedia Variable Bitrate (RMVB) is a variable bitrate extension of the RealMedia multimedia digital container format developed by RealNetworks. As opposed to the more common RealMedia container, which holds streaming media encoded at a constant bitrate (CBR), RMVB is typically used for multimedia content stored locally. Files using this format have the file extension ".rmvb".
ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. It is free software released under GNU General Public License 2.0, runs on Windows, and is implemented as a Video for Windows (VFW) codec and a DirectShow filter.
x264 is a free and open-source software library and a command-line utility developed by VideoLAN for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
FAAC is a software project which includes the AAC encoder FAAC and decoder FAAD2. It supports MPEG-2 AAC as well as MPEG-4 AAC. It supports several MPEG-4 Audio object types, file formats, multichannel and gapless encoding/decoding and MP4 metadata tags. The encoder and decoder is compatible with standard-compliant audio applications using one or more of these object types and facilities. It also supports Digital Radio Mondiale.
Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.
libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.
The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.
Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is an open source application programming interface that allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing unit (GPU). It is implemented by the free and open-source library libva, combined with a hardware-specific driver, usually provided together with the GPU driver.
VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Recorder (SUPER) is a closed-source front end for open-source software video players and encoders provided by the FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, musepack, Monkey's Audio, True Audio, WavPack, libavcodec, and the Theora/Vorbis RealProducer plugIn projects. It was first released in 2005. SUPER provides a graphical user interface to these back-end programs, which use a command-line interface.
x265 is an encoder for creating digital video streams in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) video compression format developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). It is available as a command-line app or a software library, under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later; however, customers may request a commercial license.
Libav is an abandoned free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that contains libraries and programs for handling multimedia data.
