Facebook Engineering


Meta runs FFmpeg and ffprobe tens of billions of times daily to handle over 1 billion video uploads. For years, Meta maintained an internal FFmpeg fork to support threaded multi-lane encoding and real-time quality metrics. By collaborating with FFmpeg developers, FFlabs, and VideoLAN, Meta contributed these capabilities upstream—threaded multi-lane encoding landed in FFmpeg 6.0/8.0 and in-loop decoding for real-time quality metrics in 7.0—allowing Meta to fully deprecate its internal fork for VOD and livestreaming pipelines. Meta also integrated its custom MSVP video transcoding ASIC via FFmpeg's standard hardware APIs, though that integration remains internal since the hardware isn't publicly accessible. Meta plans to continue investing in upstream FFmpeg development.

FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale

Building More Efficient Multi-Lane Transcoding for VOD and Livestreaming

Enabling Real-Time Quality Metrics While Transcoding for Livestreams

We Upstream When It Will Have the Most Community Impact