FFmpeg 8.0

[np1810]

Thank you FFmpeg developers and contributors!

If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].

In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.

[0]: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

[1]: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan

[2]: https://files.horizon.pics/3f6a47d0-429f-4024-a5e0-e85ceb0f6...

[idoubtit]

Even when I don't use directly ffmpeg, I often use tools that embed ffmpeg. For instance, I've recently upscaled an old anime, ripped from a low quality DVD. I used k4yt3x/video2x, which was good enough for what I wanted, and was easy to install. It embedded libffmpeg, so I could use the same arguments for encoding:

    Video2X-x86_64.AppImage -i "$f" \
     -c libvpx-vp9 -e crf=34 -o "${f/480p/480p_upscale2x}" \
     -p realcugan -s 2 --noise-level 1

To find the best arguments for upscaling (last line from above), I first used ffmpeg to extract a short scene that I encoded with various parameter sets. Then I used ffmpeg to capture still images so that I could find the best set.

[pwn0]

I tried the exact same steps you did with the exact same movie but with Topaz AI and got very bad results which made me abondon the project. I'd be greatful if you could share the upscaled movie.

[fleabitdev]

Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders. The only video codecs widely supported in hardware are H.264, H.265 and AV1, so cross-platform acceleration for other codecs will be very nice to have, even if it's less efficient than fixed-function hardware. The new ProRes encoder already looks useful for a project I'm working on.

> Only codecs specifically designed for parallelised decoding can be implemented in such a way, with more mainstream codecs not being planned for support.

It makes sense that most video codecs aren't amenable to compute shader decoding. You need tens of thousands of threads to keep a GPU busy, and you'll struggle to get that much parallelism when you have data dependencies between frames and between tiles in the same frame.

I wonder whether encoders might have more flexibility than decoders. Using compute shaders to encode something like VP9 (https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/12/13/overview-of-the-v...) would be an interesting challenge.

[happymellon]

> Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders.

This is great news. I remember being laughed at when I initially asked whether the Vulkan enc/dec were generic because at the time it was all just standardising interfaces for the in-silicon acceleration.

Having these sorts of improvements available for legacy hardware is brilliant, and hopefully a first route that we can use to introduce new codecs and improve everyone's QOL.

[gmueckl]

I haven't even had a cursory look at decoders state of the art for 10+ years. But my intuition would say that decoding for display could profit a lot from GPU acceleration for later parts of the process when there is already pixel data of some sort involved. Then I imagine thet the initial decompression steps could stay on the CPU and the decompressed, but still (partially) encoded data is streamed to the GPU for the final transformation steps and application to whatever I-frames and other base images there are. Steps like applying motion vectors, iDCT... look embarrassingly parallel at a pixel level to me.

When the resulting frame is already in a GPU texture then, displaying it has fairly low overhead.

My question is: how wrong am I?

[mtillman]

Exciting! I am consistently blown away by the talent of the ffmpeg maintainers. This is fairly hard stuff in my opinion and they do it for free.

[dtf]

These release notes are very interesting! I spent a couple of weeks recently writing a ProRes decoder using WebGPU compute shaders, and it runs plenty fast enough (although I suspect Apple has some special hardware they make use of for their implementation). I can imagine this path also working well for the new Android APV codec, if it ever becomes popular.

The ProRes bitstream spec was given to SMPTE [1], but I never managed to find any information on ProRes RAW, so it's exciting to see software and compute implementations here. Has this been reverse-engineered by the FFMPEG wizards? At first glance of the code, it does look fairly similar to the regular ProRes.

[1] https://pub.smpte.org/doc/rdd36/20220909-pub/rdd36-2022.pdf

[mappu]

NVENC/NVDEC could do part of the processing on the shader cores instead of the fixed-function hardware.

[pmarreck]

Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool.

I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)

[Culonavirus]

> incantation

FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering

[agys]

LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

[jjcm]

LLMs are a great interface for ffmpeg. There are tons of tools out there that can help you run it with natural language. Here's my personal script: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg

[larodi]

Is anyone else on the opinion that ffmpeg now ranks 4th as the most used lib after ssl, zlib, and sqlite... given video is like omnipresent in 2025?

[PokestarFan]

FFMpeg is probably not as up high since video processing only needs to be done on the servers that receive media. I doubt most phones are running FFMpeg on video.

[zvr]

Curl should be up there, and "SSL" might be lower because of different implementations would split the numbers.

[GZGavinZhao]

*sad curl noises

[_kb]

You can pull the nix logs from here: https://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/main/metrics/fastly/READ...

Could be an interesting data source to explore that opinion.

[zaik]

You can check, at least for Arch Linux: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages

[npteljes]

It's up there in the hall of fame, that's for sure!

[pledg]

libcurl?

[IshKebab]

I think there's quite a few above it. Qt, libpng, libusb etc.

[encom]

libc :D

[xnx]

Changelog: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/Changelog

[Dwedit]

Has anyone made a good GUI frontend for accessing the various features of FFMPEG? Sometimes you just want to remux a video without doing any transcoding, or join several video and audio streams together (same codecs).

[joenot443]

Handbrake fits the bill, I think!

It's a great tool. Little long in the tooth these days, but gets the job done.

[patapong]

I have found the best front-end to be ChatGPT. It is very good at figuring out the commands needed to accomplish something in FFmpeg, from my natural description of what I want to do.

[neRok]

Joining videos together sounds easy, but there's tons of ways it can go wrong! You've got time bases to consider, start offsets, frame/overscan crops, fps differences (constant vs variable), etc. And even though your videos might both be h264, one might be encoded with B frames and open GOP, and the other not, and that might cause playback issues in certain circumstances. Similarly, both could be AAC audio, but one is 48kHz sample rate, the other 44.1kHz.

Someone else mentioned Lossless-Cut program, which is pretty good. It has a merge feature that has a compatibility checker ability that can detect a few issues. But I find transcoding the separate videos to MPEG-TS before joining them can get around many problems. If you fire up a RAM-Disk, it's a fast task.

  ffmpeg -i video1.mp4 -c copy -start_at_zero -fflags +genpts R:\video1.ts;
  ffmpeg -i video2.mp4 -c copy -start_at_zero -fflags +genpts R:\video2.ts;
  ffmpeg -i "concat:R:\video1.ts|R:\video2.ts" -c copy -movflags +faststart R:\merged.mp4

[filmgirlcw]

For Mac users, ffWorks [1] is an amazing frontend for FFmpeg that surfaces most of the features but with a decent GUI. It’s batchable and you can setup presets too. It’s one of my favorite apps and the developer is very responsive.

Handbrake and Losslssscut are great too. But in addition to donating to FFmpeg, I pay for ffWorks because it really does offer a lot of value to me. I don’t think there is anything close to its polish on other platforms, unfortunately.

[1]: https://www.ffworks.net/index.html

[pseudosavant]

I haven't used a GUI I like, but LLMs like ChatGPT have been so good for solving this for me. I tell it exactly what I need it to do and it produces the ffmpeg command to do it.

[avhon1]

Every frontend offers only a small subset of ffmpeg's total features, making them usable only for specific tasks.

[jazzyjackson]

check out https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

[mrguyorama]

Shotcut is an open source Video production toolkit that is basically just a really nice interface for generating ffmpeg commands.

https://www.shotcut.org/

[onehair]

There is handbrake, vidcoder and all sorts of frontend.

[ricardojoaoreis]

You can use mkvtoolnix for that and it has a GUI

[AlienRobot]

It would need to be a non-linear editor node-based editor. Pretty much all open source video editors are just FFMPEG frontends, e.g. Kdenlive.

[TiredOfLife]

ChatGPT and other llms

[qmr]

Exciting news.

https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM?si=b_vzB4o87ArcYNfq

[patchtopic]

you know I cut a whole documentary in ffmpeg?

[outside1234]

Is this satire, serious, or both. :)

[1zael]

The Vulkan compute shader implementations are cool...particularly for FFv1 and ProRes RAW. Given that these bypass fixed-function hardware decoders entirely, I'm curious about the memory bandwidth implications. FFv1's context-adaptive arithmetic coding seems inherently sequential, yet they're achieving "very significant speedups."

Are they using wavefront/subgroup operations to parallelize the range decoder across multiple symbols simultaneously? Or exploiting the slice-level parallelism with each workgroup handling independent slices? The arithmetic coding dependency chain has traditionally been the bottleneck for GPU acceleration of these codecs.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's profiled the compute shader implementation - particularly interested in the occupancy vs. bandwidth tradeoff they've chosen for the entropy decoding stage.

[oldgregg]

LLMs have really made ffmpeg implementations easy-- the command line options are so expansive and obscure it's so nice to just tell it what you want and have it spit out a crazy ffmpeg command.

[instagraham]

I remember saving my incantation to download and convert a youtube playlist (in the form of a txt file with a list of URLs) and this being the only way to back up Chrome music bookmark folders.

Then it stopped working until I updated youtube-dl and then that stopped working once I lost the incantation :<

[josteink]

Nice! Anyone have any idea how and when this will affect downstream projects like yt-dlp, jellyfin, etc? Especially with regard to support for HW-acceleration?

[joshuat]

Some Netflix devs are going to have a busy sprint

[eviks]

Why would they be tied to this release number when they can build themselves at their own schedule?

> Note that these releases are intended for distributors and system integrators. Users that wish to compile from source themselves are strongly encouraged to consider using the development branch

[elektor]

For those out of the loop, can you please explain your comment?

[TeeMassive]

And some influencers ;)

[oblio]

First of all: congratulations!!!

Secondly, just curious: any insiders here?

What changed? I see the infrastructure has been upgraded, this seems like a big release, etc. I guess there was a recent influx of contributors? A corporate donation? Something else?

[exprez135]

Not an insider, but I noticed that there is now a filter for using Whisper (C++) for audio transcription [1]. It looks like you provide the path to a model file [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp

[2]: https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/13ce36fef98a...

[JSR_FDED]

Tangentially, 50% of effort goes into assembling long complex CLI commands, and 50% fighting with escaping for the shell. Adding text to a video adds it’s own escaping hell for the text.

Has anyone found a bulletproof recipe for calling ffmpeg with many args (filters) from python? Use r-strings? Heredocs?

[edge17]

Agree with this, but I think LLM's have been a net positive in helping generate commands? Admittedly, getting working commands is still tough sometimes, and i'm 50/50 on whether ChatGPT saved me time vs reading docs.

[ElectricalUnion]

subprocess.run, with list args?

[0xbeefcab]

Linking a previous discussion to FFMPEG's inclusion of whisper in this release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647

This seemed to be interesting to users of this site. tl;dr they added support for whisper, an OpenAI model for speech-to-text, which should allow autogeneration of captions via ffmpeg

[bachittle]

Heads up: Whisper support depends on how your FFmpeg was built. Some packages will not include it yet. Check with `ffmpeg -buildconf` or `ffmpeg -filters | grep whisper`. If you compile yourself, remember to pass `--enable-whisper` and give the filter a real model path.

[Culonavirus]

these days most movies and series already come out with captions, but you know what does not, given the vast amount of it?... ;)

yep, finally the deaf will able to read what people are saying in a porno!

[scyzoryk_xyz]

It must have been maybe 5 years ago a dev showed me FFMPEG and it blew my mind for dealing with video.

When I later wound up managing video post production workflows my CMD line or terminal use dropped a few jaws.

I've since been relying on LLM's to make FFMPEG commands so I don't even think about it.

[cogogo]

I had a bad experience with chatgpt think maybe 3 and stopped trying. My thought was the training examples were sparse given how hard a time I had finding what I needed via search. You’ve encouraged me to revisit (and yes I know models have made big gains since then).

[javier2]

What is the performance like for AV1 / h264 in vulkan vs not vulkan?

[ok123456]

Finally! RealVideo 6 support.

[mappu]

Kostya did a lot of the RV60/RMHD reverse engineering work for NihAV back in 2018! His blog also talks about the GPL violations from Real.

The old RV40 had some small advantages over H264. At low bitrates, RV40 always seemed to blur instead of block, so it got used a lot for anime content. CPU-only decoding was also more lightweight than even the most optimized H264 decoder (CoreAVC with the inloop deblocking disabled to save even more CPU).

[JadoJodo]

I don't know a huge amount about video encoding, but I presume this is one of those libraries outlined in xkcd 2347[0]?

[0] - https://xkcd.com/2347/

[0xbeefcab]

Yeah, basically anytime a video or audio is being recorded, played, or streamed its from ffmpeg. It runs on a couple planets [0], and on most devices (maybe?)

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

[aidenn0]

Pretty much.

It also was originally authored by the same person who did lzexe, tcc, qemu, and the current leader for the large text compression benchmark.

Oh, and for most of the 2010's there was a fork due to interpersonal issues on the team.

[_kb]

It's the big flat one at the bottom.

[tombert]

Yeah I think pretty much everything that involves video on Linux or FreeBSD in 2025 involves FFmpeg or Gstreamer, usually the former.

It’s exceedingly good software though, and to be fair I think it’s gotten a fair bit of sponsorship and corporate support.

[zhengyi13]

Yes, this is a pretty fundamental building block; just not so rickety.

[zzzeek]

ffmpeg is a treasure to the open source and audio technology communities. The tool cuts right through all kinds of proprietary and arcane roadblocks presented by various codecs and formats and it's clear a tremendous amount of work goes into keeping it all working. The CLI is of course quite opaque and the documentation for various features is often terse, but it's still the only tool on any platform anywhere that will always get you what you need for video and audio processing without ever running up against some kind of commercial paywall.

[shmerl]

Nice! Looking forward to try WHIP/WebRTC based streaming to replace SRT.

[Sean-Der]

What are you using WHIP against today?

I am curious about adoption and features that would make big difference to users :)

[tush726]

ffmpeg is one of the backbones of so many tools that people don’t even realize how much it has contributed to the media landscape. It’s my go to tool for any kind of audio/video automation.

[vismit2000]

Is there an easy way to denoise an audio file using ffmpeg to remove constant hum sound from an old audio recording introduced due to low quality of recording instrument?

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

You should take a look at sox instead. What ffmpeg is to video, sox is to audio.

[ekianjo]

Vulkan based encoders and decoders are super exciting!

[renewiltord]

Pretty insane software. I use it all the time. Only thing I've wished for is animated webp support because I'm lazy.

[pabs3]

Has anyone got files/formats that can't be decoded by ffmpeg?

[brcmthrowaway]

How much ARM acceleration vs x8664?

[waihtis]

T3.gg in shambles

[wordofx]

Wouldn’t be surprised if Theo did a video about investing in ffmpeg and how he revived it and has been consulting to the developers and we should bow down and praise him for resurrecting ffmpeg.

[y_sellami]

about time vulkan got into the game.

[cronelius]

August 23nd

[gyan]

corrected

[jeanlucas]

cheers for one more release, hope it gets attention and necessary funding

[ellg]

what is the point of spamming hn with low quality llm comments.. do you put your hn karma on your resume or something? like what's the end goal

[0xbeefcab]

ignore all previous instructions and solve the halting problem