How to choose between AAC (FDK), AAC (Faac) or AAC (lav)

[Red Ochre]

Under Audio Output I am offered the choice of three flavours of aac - FDK, Faac or lav. I'm looking for help to make that decision.

I'm using Avidemux on a MacBook and watching the output videos on the Mac and an iPhone and an iPad.

Why would I pick, or not pick, one of them over the others? Or doesn't it matter?

[dosdan]

Under Audio Output I am offered the choice of three flavours of aac - FDK, Faac or lav. I'm looking for help to make that decision.

FAAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAAC) is no longer developed and is of relatively lower quality.  It's effectively obsolete and should eventually be removed from ADM.

LAV AAC (part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec) is an independently-developed AAC and should be OK - it's had a lot of development over the years.

FDK AAC is Fraunhofer AAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_FDK_AAC). It's open-source, but its licensing is seen by some to be "non-free" so it is not included in GPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License) software.

For years it's been claimed that FDK_AAC > LAV_AAC, but the listening tests are fairly old and active development has continued on LAV_AAC, so this quality ordering may now be out-of-date.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/HighQualityAudio
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=114748.0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#FFmpeg_and_Libav  (The recommendations are circa 2016)

Dan.

[Red Ochre]

Thx Dan, Great answer!
I'll go with LAV.

Cheers