FFmpeg 9.0: More Acceleration via Vulkan, Animated WebP and New AMD AMF Filters

The developers have unveiled FFmpeg 9.0 — the latest major release of one of the most in-demand open-source multimedia libraries, which underpins a countless number of players, converters and streaming services.

Acceleration via Vulkan and Other GPUs

A significant share of the work in this cycle went into the Vulkan API. Hardware decoding of video in the APV format has appeared, along with the v360_vulkan filter for working with 360-degree panoramic video. A transpose filter running on NVIDIA CUDA (transpose_cuda) has also been added to the hardware accelerators, and for macOS, ProRes RAW acceleration through VideoToolbox has been implemented.

Animated WebP and New Codecs

Support for animated WebP deserves a special mention: FFmpeg 9.0 has gained both a decoder and a demuxer for this format. Decoding of HE-AAC 960 (used in DAB+ digital radio broadcasting) has appeared, as well as a rather exotic video encoder and muxer for the Playdate handheld console.

Progress on AMD AMF

Work on supporting AMD accelerators continues. The release includes several new AMF-based filters at once: a frame rate converter (vf_frc_amf), a video quality enhancer (vf_vqe_amf), and expanded HDR capabilities in the color converter. Support for mapping AMF hardware memory has been added.

HDR, Dolby Vision and AI

Among the other new features are support for SMPTE 2094-50 metadata and its pass-through, as well as a bitstream filter for splitting multi-layer HEVC with Dolby Vision. Also of note is a new DNN backend based on ONNX Runtime with support for execution on the GPU — a step toward hardware-accelerated neural network filters.

There are removals as well: decoding of CELT and parsing of ogg/celt have been dropped from the project (this does not affect CELT as part of Opus), along with deprecated NVENC options and support for SDK versions older than 11.1. Optimization for AVX-512 instructions has continued.

Those eager to try out all the new features can already build FFmpeg 9.0 from source.

Source: Phoronix