Eight months after the previous v8.0, FFmpeg 8.1, codenamed “Hoare,” has rolled out, with expanded support for Vulkan compute-based codecs. The release also adds ProRes encoding and decoding, as well as DPX decoding via Vulkan compute.
On top of that, the update adds new decoding capabilities, including experimental support for xHE-AAC Mps212 and MPEG-H decoding via the libmpeghdec library. Plus, metadata handling has been improved with EXIF metadata parsing and support for parsing and forwarding LCEVC stream metadata.
FFmpeg 8.1 also adds Rockchip H.264 and HEVC hardware encoding support. Additional hardware improvements include new Direct3D 12 features, D3D12-based H.264 and AV1 encoding, and filters such as scale_d3d12, mestimate_d3d12, and deinterlace_d3d12.
Audio capabilities are enhanced with support for IAMF projection mode Ambisonic Audio Elements, enabling muxing and demuxing of this spatial audio format. The MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding via the mpeghdec library is another new addition.
Apart from those changes, the multimedia processing pipeline now includes a new hxvs demuxer and filters such as drawvg and vpp_amf. Developers are also advancing a major rewrite of the swscale library, which handles image scaling in FFmpeg.
Finally, this update brings JPEG-XS support, including a parser and encoding/decoding via libsvtjpegxs, as well as a raw bitstream muxer and demuxer for the format.
For more information, see the announcement. The full changelog is here.
FFmpeg 8.1 “Hoare” is available for download from the project’s website. Developers recommend that users, distributors, and system integrators upgrade unless they are already using the latest development version from the Git repository.
