Redistributed ffmpeg

Valendo's installers include ffmpeg 6.1.1. It is invoked as a separate executable — Valendo hands it a file and reads one back — and none of its code is linked into the application. This is mere aggregation, not linking.

This page is a licence obligation, and it stays online for as long as the binaries ship. The GPL requires the offer of corresponding source to remain reachable, so this page has a permanent address that does not depend on any code host.

What each platform carries

The two differ for a licensing reason, not a technical one. The Mac App Store does not accept software under the GPL, and libx264 — an H.264 encoder released under that licence — was the only component forcing it. The macOS build drops it entirely and encodes through the system's own VideoToolbox instead.

The source

The corresponding source for both builds is the official FFmpeg 6.1.1 release, unmodified:

• Tarball: ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-6.1.1.tar.xz
• Repository tag: n6.1.1 at git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git

Neither build patches the source. What differs between them, and from a stock build, is the set of configure options below.

How the macOS build is configured

This is the exact configuration reported by the shipped binary, which you can confirm yourself by running ffmpeg -version on the copy inside the application bundle:

--disable-autodetect
--enable-zlib
--enable-videotoolbox
--enable-audiotoolbox
--enable-runtime-cpudetect
--disable-network
--disable-ffplay
--disable-doc
--disable-debug

There is no --enable-gpl, no --enable-version3, no --enable-libx264 and no --enable-nonfree. The build fails outright if any of them appears, or if the resulting binary reports anything other than LGPL version 2.1. Running ffmpeg -L on the shipped copy prints the notice itself.

--disable-network is deliberate: the ffmpeg inside Valendo reads and writes local files only. It opens no connections.

Rebuilding it

The build recipe is a single shell script, and it is the same one CI runs. It is included in the source distribution of Valendo and reproduced here in full for anyone who wants to verify the result:

curl -fsSL https://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-6.1.1.tar.xz -o ffmpeg.tar.xz
tar xf ffmpeg.tar.xz
cd ffmpeg-6.1.1

./configure \
  --prefix=/tmp/ffmpeg-prefix \
  --disable-autodetect \
  --enable-zlib \
  --enable-videotoolbox \
  --enable-audiotoolbox \
  --enable-runtime-cpudetect \
  --disable-network \
  --disable-ffplay \
  --disable-doc \
  --disable-debug

make -j"$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)"

For the Windows build, the source, the build scripts and the configuration are published by gyan.dev at the address above.

Licence texts

FFmpeg's own licence documentation is part of the source tarball, in the files COPYING.LGPLv2.1, COPYING.GPLv3 and LICENSE.md. The applicable text for each platform is the one named in the table at the top of this page.

If anything on this page is unclear, or a link has gone stale, write to [email protected] and it will be fixed.