On December 20, 2000, French mathematician Fabrice Bellard, who once founded the QEMU project, published the first version package FFmpeg , which includes a set of applications and libraries for operations on various multimedia formats. Since then, FFmpeg has evolved into one of the key open source multimedia processing products used in many free and proprietary media players and applications, Chrome and Firefox browsers, and various services, including YouTube.
From 2004 to the present, key role in maintaining the project playing Michael Niedermayer. Until 2015, Niedermeier was considered the official leader of FFmpeg, making final decisions about architecture and development, but in 2015, to resolve the conflict with the developers of the Libav fork, he resigned and since then the project has formally remained without a leader, but Niedermeier continues to be responsible for the release and maintains the position of the maintainer of key components.