Category:x264

x264 is a free software library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. The code is written by Loren Merritt, Laurent Aimar, Eric Petit, Min Chen, Justin Clay, Måns Rullgård, Radek Czyz, Alex Izvorski, Alex Wright, and Christian Heine from scratch.

x264 is one of the most popular video compression libraries in the world, used worldwide for applications such as web video, television broadcast, and Blu-ray authoring. It outclasses practically all commercial implementations both speed and compression-wise. While not actually part of VLC media player or ffmpeg, it is a major library used by both, licensed under the GPL. Due to its popularity in the commercial world (for example, Youtube and Facebook rely on it), many companies have offered bounties in the past for features and improvements that they found useful.

x264 has a strong user community based at Doom9 where discussions for improved development take place.

Developers

• x264 home page
• x264 Development Notes
• x264 TODO
• x264 asm intro

An overview of x264's structure and algorithms can be found here. It is somewhat outdated, but still mostly accurate. Do note that understanding this is not necessary for developing on x264.

On a lighter note, feel free to check out the x264 developer quotes page.

Demos

flyingskunk.mkv demo encoded with x264/vorbis/matroska - (96 MB, 640x480, 25 fps, 6 minutes), created using LiVES