The only open source video transcoder is ffmpeg. The “FF” in the name means fast forward and MPEG is a video standards group. It is a collection of libraries that include libavcodec, x264, theora and a bunch other audio/video codecs. You can control the program by commandline to stream, convert and record all types of video formats.

The project was started by Fabrice Bellard (using the pseudonym “Gerard Lantau”), and is now maintained by Michael Niedermayer. Many FFmpeg developers are also part of the MPlayer project, and FFmpeg is hosted at the MPlayer project server.

Because no one has taken on commercial support yet. FFmpeg development is driven by the tasks that are important to the individual developers. If there is a feature that is important to you, the best way to get it implemented is to undertake the task yourself or sponsor a developer.

Windows DLLs are not portable, bloated and often slow. Moreover FFmpeg strives to support all codecs natively. A DLL loader is not conducive to that goal. For multithreaded MPEG* encoding, the encoded slices must be independent, otherwise thread n would practically have to wait for n-1 to finish, so it’s quite logical that there is a small reduction of quality. This is not a bug.

There are two video codecs and one video container invented in the FFmpeg project during its development. The two video codecs are the lossless “FFV1″, and the lossless or lossy “Snow codec”, for which a version 1.0 is still in development, and the video container is “NUT” which is also currently being actively developed.

Take a look at Ankoder, it is a hosted ffmpeg alternative video transcoder. It has more video encoding features then traditional FFMpeg hosting.