September 30th, 2024, FFmpeg 7.1 "Péter"

FFmpeg 7.1 "Péter", a new major release, is now available! A full list of changes can be found in the release changelog.

The more important highlights of the release are that the VVC decoder, merged as experimental in version 7.0, has had enough time to mature and be optimized enough to be declared as stable. The codec is starting to gain traction with broadcast standardization bodies.
Support has been added for a native AAC USAC (part of the xHE-AAC coding system) decoder, with the format starting to be adopted by streaming websites, due to its extensive volume normalization metadata.
MV-HEVC decoding is now supported. This is a stereoscopic coding tool that begun to be shipped and generated by recent phones and VR headsets.
LC-EVC decoding, an enhancement metadata layer to attempt to improve the quality of codecs, is now supported via an external library.

Support for Vulkan encoding, with H264 and HEVC was merged. This finally allows fully Vulkan-based decode-filter-encode pipelines, by having a sink for Vulkan frames, other than downloading or displaying them. The encoders have feature-parity with their VAAPI implementation counterparts. Khronos has announced that support for AV1 encoding is also coming soon to Vulkan, and FFmpeg is aiming to have day-one support.

In addition to the above, this release has had a lot of important internal work done. By far, the standout internally are the improvements made for full-range images. Previously, color range data had two paths, no negotiation, and was unreliably forwarded to filters, encoders, muxers. Work on cleaning the system up started more than 10 years ago, however this stalled due to how fragile the system was, and that breaking behaviour would be unacceptable. The new system fixes this, so now color range is forwarded correctly and consistently everywhere needed, and also laid the path for more advanced forms of negotiation.
Cropping metadata is now supported with Matroska and MP4 formats. This metadata is important not only for archival, but also with AV1, as hardware encoders require its signalling due to the codec not natively supporting one.

As usual, we recommend that users, distributors, and system integrators to upgrade unless they use current git master.