August 22nd, 2025, FFmpeg 8.0 "Huffman"

A new major release, FFmpeg 8.0 "Huffman", is now available for download. Thanks to several delays, and modernization of our entire infrastructure, this release ended up being one of our largest releases to date. In short, its new features are:

Native decoders: APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, G.728

VVC decoder improvements: IBC, ACT, Palette Mode

Vulkan compute-based codecs: FFv1 (encode and decode), ProRes RAW (decode only)

Hardware accelerated decoding: Vulkan VP9, VAAPI VVC, OpenHarmony H264/5

Hardware accelerated encoding: Vulkan AV1, OpenHarmony H264/5

Formats: MCC, G.728, Whip, APV

Filters: colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, Whisper, and others

A new class of decoders and encoders based on pure Vulkan compute implementation have been added. Vulkan is a cross-platform, open standard set of APIs that allows programs to use GPU hardware in various ways, from drawing on screen, to doing calculations, to decoding video via custom hardware accelerators. Rather than using a custom hardware accelerator present, these codecs are based on compute shaders, and work on any implementation of Vulkan 1.3.
Decoders use the same hwaccel API and commands, so users do not need to do anything special to enable them, as enabling Vulkan decoding is sufficient to use them.
Encoders, like our hardware accelerated encoders, require specifying a new encoder (ffv1_vulkan). Currently, the only codecs supported are: FFv1 (encoding and decoding) and ProRes RAW (decode only). ProRes (encode+decode) and VC-2 (encode+decode) implementations are complete and currently in review, to be merged soon and available with the next minor release.
Only codecs specifically designed for parallelized decoding can be implemented in such a way, with more mainstream codecs not being planned for support.
Depending on the hardware, these new codecs can provide very significant speedups, and open up possibilities to work with them for situations like non-linear video editors and lossless screen recording/streaming, so we are excited to learn what our downstream users can make with them.

The project has recently started to modernize its infrastructure. Our mailing list servers have been fully upgraded, and we have recently started to accept contributions via a new forge, available on code.ffmpeg.org, running a Forgejo instance.

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