ffmpeg / avconv : List supported codecs

You can list all codecs supported by libavconv (the library used by ffmpeg / avconv) by using this command:

ffmpeg -codecs

If you don’t have the ffmpeg executable simply use

avconv -codecs

Note that avconv and ffmpeg are essentially the same, but the projects split at some time and then re-merged. Starting from Ubuntu 15.04, ffmpeg is available in the repositories again, whereas previously, ffmpeg was replaced by avconv.

For details, see this StackOverflow thread and this detailed post about the ffmpeg/libav situation.