When I say libav*, I and most people mean libavformat, libavcodec, libswscale, etc.; the C libraries that form the basis of the command line tool and are widely used elsewhere.
libav (no wildcard) is a fork of FFmpeg that is broadly focused on reducing bloat and cleaning up the API. As such, libav tends to add features more slowly, while FFmpeg generally follows all of libav’s new features and bug fixes as well as its own [1]. Debian was on libav for a while but went back to FFmpeg in 2015 [2].
> When I say libav*, I and most people mean libavformat, libavcodec, libswscale, etc.; the C libraries that form the basis of the command line tool and are widely used elsewhere.
Oh, so were those things called "libav" even before the fork, and were perhaps the origin for the name of the fork libav?
libav (no wildcard) is a fork of FFmpeg that is broadly focused on reducing bloat and cleaning up the API. As such, libav tends to add features more slowly, while FFmpeg generally follows all of libav’s new features and bug fixes as well as its own [1]. Debian was on libav for a while but went back to FFmpeg in 2015 [2].
[1] http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html
[2] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Debian-Moves-to-FFmpeg-and-Dr...