After more than six months of development, the release of version 8.1 of the project occurred FFmpeg, codenamed "Hoare" (in honor of Sir Charles Hoare (January 11, 1934 — March 5, 2026)).
This is a set of free libraries and utilities with open-source code that allows you to record, convert, and stream digital audio and video recordings in various formats. The name comes from the expert group MPEG and FF, which stands for "fast forward."
The project consists of the following components:
- ffmpeg — a command-line utility for converting a video file from one format to another and capturing video in real time.
- ffplay — a simple media player based on SDL2 and the FFmpeg libraries.
- ffprobe — a command-line utility for gathering and displaying information about media files (like MediaInfo) and multimedia streams, available devices, codecs, formats, protocols, etc.
- libavcodec — a library that includes all audio/video codecs. Most codecs were developed "from scratch" to provide the best performance.
- libavformat — a library with muxers and demuxers for various audio and video formats.
- libavutil — a utility library with standard common subprograms for various ffmpeg components.
- libpostproc — a library of standard subprograms for video processing.
- libswscale — a library for scaling videos.
- libavfilter — allows modifying the video stream between the decoder and encoder "on the fly."
Key Changes:
- added experimental support for decoding xHE-AAC MPEG-H using the libmpeghdec library;
- added parsing of EXIF metadata;
- implemented support for parsing and forwarding metadata LCEVC (Layered Coding for Efficient Video Coding);
- encoding and decoding ProRes and decoding DPX using Vulkan;
- D3D12: encoding H.264/AV1, scaling filters (scale_d3d12), motion estimation (mestimate_d3d12) and deinterlacing (deinterlace_d3d12);
- for Rockchip platforms, hardware encoding of H.264 and HEVC has been added;
- added support for the spatial audio format IAMF: projection mode, multiplexing and demultiplexing of surround sound Ambisonic;
- new filters and formats: the drawvg filter for rendering SVG and the vpp_amf filter for video processing via AMD AMF; a demuxer for the hxvs format has been added.
This release includes many internal changes and bug fixes. Work is ongoing for the upcoming revamp of swscale. Vulkan-based codecs and some filters no longer rely on GLSL compilation at runtime, which speeds up their initialization. In the blog Khronos an additional article has been published about the implementation of Vulkan Compute-based codecs, containing technical details of the implementation and future plans.
Source: linux.org.ru
