Over ten months after the previous 7.1 release, the FFmpeg project has rolled out version 8.0, loaded with new features and some notable cleanups under the hood.
One of the headline additions is a new Whisper filter, expanding FFmpeg’s growing toolset for audio processing. On the video side, there’s also fresh support for animated JPEG XL encoding through libjxl, along with an enhanced FLV v2 format that now handles multitrack audio and video as well as modern codecs.
Codec enthusiasts will find even more to unpack. The update introduces decoders for RealVideo 6.0, ProRes RAW, and G.728, plus a VVC VAAPI decoder that extends support for screen content coding features like inter block copy, palette mode, and adaptive color transform.
Plus, a brand-new APV codec lands too, with decoding, parsing, muxing, and even encoding available through the libopenapv wrapper.
Regarding hardware acceleration, FFmpeg 8.0 brings Vulkan-based support for both VP9 hwaccel and AV1 encoding, and ProRes RAW decoding also gets a Vulkan hwaccel path. New filters are also introduced, including pad_cuda, colordetect, and vf_scale_d3d11.
On the security and maintenance front, this release drops support for older OpenSSL versions below 1.1.0, deprecates OpenMAX encoders, and officially ends Yasm support, pushing users to NASM instead.
Lastly, TLS peer certificate verification is slated to be enabled by default in the next major version, signaling a stronger security stance going forward.
For more information, see the full changelog.
