December 5th, 2015, The native FFmpeg AAC encoder is now stable!

After seven years the native FFmpeg AAC encoder has had its experimental flag removed and declared as ready for general use. The encoder is transparent at 128kbps for most samples tested with artifacts only appearing in extreme cases. Subjective quality tests put the encoder to be of equal or greater quality than most of the other encoders available to the public.

Licensing has always been an issue with encoding AAC audio as most of the encoders have had a license making FFmpeg unredistributable if compiled with support for them. The fact that there now exists a fully open and truly free AAC encoder integrated directly within the project means a lot to those who wish to use accepted and widespread standards.

The majority of the work done to bring the encoder up to quality was started during this year's GSoC by developer Claudio Freire and Rostislav Pehlivanov. Both continued to work on the encoder with the latter joining as a developer and mainainer, working on other parts of the project as well. Also, thanks to Kamedo2 who does comparisons and tests, the original authors and all past and current contributors to the encoder. Users are suggested and encouraged to use the encoder and provide feedback or breakage reports through our bug tracker.