FFmpeg’s ‘Largest Release’ Yet Brings Vulkan Video Processing

FFmpeg is the powerful yet invisible open source media engine that handles most video tasks on Linux, and beyond – this weekend it’s developers pushed out a major update.

“Thanks to several delays, and modernization of our entire infrastructure, this release ended up being one of our largest releases to date”, the development team say in a release announcement.

The highlight sees FFmpeg 8.0 add Vulkan compute-based codecs. These provide an alternative to hardware-based accelerators for video decoding and encoding by making use of compute shaders that “work on any implementation of Vulkan 1.3”.

Modern GPUs (discrete and integrated) have dedicated hardware media decode/encoders for common formats (“accelerators”). FFmpeg 8.0’s Vulkan approach uses general-purpose compute cores (via shaders) to handle video processing.

The feature is not planned to handle mainstream codecs (since those are well catered for with on-GPU accelerators), but support intensive codecs designed for parallel processing, and will work on any Vulkan-compatible GPU.

FFmpeg 8.0 provides FFv1 (encode and decode) and ProRes RAW (decode only) using Vulkan. The next minor update will add ProRes (encode and decode) and VC-2 (encode and decode).

For decoding, these use the same hwaccel API and commands so enabling Vulkan decoding is all that’s needed to make use of them.

“Depending on the hardware, these new codecs can provide very significant speedups,” the team say, noting they will open up new possibilities for desktop video editors, lossless screen recording/streaming tools, and other downstream use cases.

FFmpeg 8.0 also adds other native decoders, including APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, and G.728. Hardware accelerated decoding is added for Vulkan VP9, VAAPI VVC, OpenHarmony H264/5.

Vulkan AV1 and OpenHarmony H264/5 pick up accelerated encoding in FFmpeg 8.0, and there are other assorted improvements including new formats (MCC, G.728, Whip and APV).

Plus, new filters.

The “big one” addition is a Whisper audio transcription filter. This lets you use AI to generate subtitles for videos or podcasts. There’s also a new d3d11 hardware scaling filter that offloads video resizing to the GPU, for significantly faster processing than on CPU.

Beyond all of that, the FFmpeg project has initiated an infrastructure modernisation effort, upgraded its mailing list, and begun to accept contributions though code.ffmpeg.org.

Get FFmpeg 8.0

FFmpeg 8.0 source code is available to download, though many Linux distributions are likely to package and ship this version in their next major updates. Alas, Ubuntu 25.10 has already hit feature freeze with FFmpeg 7.1 in its repos.

Many media-related GUI apps powered by FFmpeg but distributed in Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage formats often use a bundled version of FFmpeg. If you manually install the latest release software might not make use of it. Some software may also break, expecting an older version.

But since FFmpeg is insanely powerful command-line tool (if a bit complex to newcomers), you don’t have to wait for a frontend to plumb in support. Grab the latest release, read up on the docs, and start kicking the tyres on the latest changes for yourself.