FFmpeg is the powerful open-source media encoder, decoder, and all-purpose framework for media files. Even if you haven’t used it directly, you’ve probably used an app that relies on it. Now, it has received a major update with the release of FFmpeg 8.0.

FFmpeg 8.0 is the tool’s first update since March 2025, and the developers say it’s “one of our largest releases to date.” First, it adds native decoding support for the APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, and G.728 codecs. ProRes RAW is Apple’s high-quality compressed video format—not to be confused with the regular ProRes video codec or ProRAW image format, both of which are capture options on some iPhone models. APV is a competitor to Apple’s (regular) ProRes format with the involvement of Samsung, and will likely appear in future Galaxy and Pixel phones.

This release also has two new Vulkan compute-based codecs, for FFv1 (encode and decode) and ProRes RAW (decode only). The team said, “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.”

Even though FFmpeg will likely add more Vulkan compute codecs in the future, they will be limited to “codecs specifically designed for parallelized decoding.” For the codecs that are supported, though, FFmpeg can provide faster performance and more flexibility with video editing and streaming.

FFmpeg 8.0 also adds Vulkan VP9, VAAPI VVC, OpenHarmony H264/5 as hardware-accelerated decoding options, and Vulkan AV1 and OpenHarmony H264/5 for hardware-accelerated encoding. The MCC, G.728, Whip, and APV media formats are supported for the first time.

Even if you’ve never directly used FFmpeg, many video editors, media converters, and other tools are built on top of it. For example, HandBrake is my favorite video converter app, and it uses FFmpeg. If you’ve ever used yt-dlp and its many variants, all of them rely on FFMpeg for file conversion. Those apps and many others might get improved performance and media file support once they integrate the latest release.

Even though it’s not part of the software itself, the FFmpeg team has also been busy modernizing the project’s infrastructure. The announcement mentioned, “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.”

Download FFmpeg

The best way to install FFmpeg is through software repositories, like APT on Ubuntu and Debian, Homebrew on Mac, or WinGet on Windows. The official downloads page also has packages for various operating systems.

Source: FFmpeg News, GitHub