FFmpeg 8.0, codenamed “Huffman,” has arrived, and it is one of the project’s most ambitious releases in years. The update comes after some delays and a complete modernization of the project’s infrastructure, making this version particularly feature-packed.
Among the new additions are several native decoders, including APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, and G.728. Improvements to the VVC decoder add support for IBC, ACT, and Palette Mode. On the hardware acceleration side, Vulkan VP9, VAAPI VVC, and OpenHarmony H.264/5 are supported for decoding, while Vulkan AV1 and OpenHarmony H.264/5 are now supported for encoding. New formats such as MCC, G.728, Whip, and APV are included, along with filters like colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, and Whisper.
The highlight of this release is the introduction of Vulkan compute-based decoders and encoders. Unlike traditional hardware accelerators, these use compute shaders and can run on any Vulkan 1.3 implementation. Users don’t need to take extra steps to enable decoding, while encoders require specifying the new options, such as ffv1_vulkan. At launch, FFv1 (encode and decode) and ProRes RAW (decode only) are supported, with ProRes (encode and decode) and VC-2 (encode and decode) expected in an upcoming minor release.
This approach only works with codecs designed for parallelized decoding, but it opens up big performance improvements. Video editors and those working with lossless recording or streaming could see speed benefits depending on their hardware.
The project has also made progress in modernizing its infrastructure. Mailing list servers have been fully upgraded, and contributions are now accepted on a new Forgejo-based platform at code.ffmpeg.org.
As always, the developers recommend that users, distributors, and system integrators upgrade to the latest release unless they are already tracking the git master branch.
