FFmpeg media library is now at version 9.0! Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 26.04, Linux Mint 21/22 from PPA.
FFmpeg 9.0 was released on August 4th 2026, which features animated WebP decoding, decoding Apple ProRes RAW videos using Apple’s VideoToolbox framework, and Vulkan accelerated APV decoding.
Other features in FFmpeg 9.0 include:
- Playdate video encoder and muxer.
- Vulkan accelerated 360 degree filter.
- NVIDIA GPU accelerated transpose_cuda filter.
- AMD GPU accelerated vf_frc_amf filter.
- AMF hardware memory mapping.
- LCEVC track muxing support in MP4 muxer.
- ONNX Runtime DNN backend with GPU execution provider support.
- Decoding of HE-AAC audio variant where each AAC frame contains 960 audio samples.
- Remove CELT decoding support (doesn’t affect Opus CELT).
- Remove ogg/celt parsing.
- Remove deprecated NVIDIA NVENC options and support for pre-11.1 SDK versions
And below are the changes in the last FFmpeg 8.0:
- Samsung’s Advanced Professional Video (APV) decoder.
- Apple’s ProRes RAW decoder.
- Sanyo LD-ADPCM, RealVideo 6.0, G.728, and ADPCM IMA Xbox decoders.
- Encoding support for APV (via libopenapv wrapper), libx265 alpha layer, and animated JPEG XL.
- Vulkan accelerated FFv1 encoding and decoding and ProRes RAW decoding.
- Vulkan accelerated VP9, VAAPI accelerated VVC decoding.
- Vulkan accelerated AV1 encoding.
- Hardware accelerated OpenHarmony H264/5 decoding & encoding.
- New filters: colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, Whisper, and others.
- APV in MP4/ISOBMFF muxing and demuxing
- VVC in Matroska,
- CENC AV1 support in MP4 muxer.
Changes in FFmpeg 7.1:
- Native decoder/encoder for VVC (aka H.266).
- Read and write IAMF (Immersive Audio) files, and new
-stream_groupCLI option to configure the IAMF structure. - CLI (command-line) tool now is multi-threaded.
- Encoding support for DXV DXT1.
- Decoding support for LEAD MCMP and QOA audio, xHE-AAC, MV-HEVC, and MediaCodec AAC/AMR-NB/AMR-WB/MP3.
- Both encoding and decoding for MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC).
- aap, tiltandshift, qrencode filter and qrencodesrc source, quirc, fsync filter, showinfo bitstream filters.
- supports for reading QOA, DVD-Video, and writing AEA, Raw Captions with Time (RCWT) closed caption.
- D3D12VA hardware accelerated H264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, MPEG-2 and VC1 decoding.
- Vulkan accelerated H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) encoder.
- ffplay with hwaccel decoding support.
- Support for HEIF/AVIF still images and tiled still images
How to Install FFmpeg (9.0 updated) in Ubuntu
NOTE: FFmpeg is an IMPORTANT library that many graphical apps depend on it. Update FFmpeg MAY run into dependency issue and even break your apps! You MUST know what you’re going to do, and use the PPA at your own risk!!!
Besides building the media library from the source tarball, I’ve upload the new release packages into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 26.04, Ubuntu 24.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 on x86_64 and arm64/armhf platforms.
Update: amd64v3 support added for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/ffmpeg9
Type user password (no asterisk feedback, just type in mind) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
Tips: for users who still need FFmpeg 8.x or 7.x, use this PPA or this PPA instead.
2. Ubuntu now auto-refresh system package while adding PPA, but some Ubuntu based system may NOT. Just in case, you can run the command below to do the refresh manually:
sudo apt update
3. Finally, run the command below to either install or upgrade to FFmpeg 9.0:
sudo apt install ffmpeg
Though it’s HIGHLY recommend to run sudo apt upgrade to update all the packages to the latest versions, to avoid in-completed installation.
NOTE: For those who have Ubuntu Pro enabled, you need to specify package source (the PPA in the case) via the command below, or it’s always prior to install the one from Ubuntu ESM.
sudo apt install -t "o=LP-PPA-ubuntuhandbook1-ffmpeg9" ffmpeg
Also replace number 9 with 8 or 7 if you added the FFmpeg8/FFmpeg7 PPA for the old versions.
4. After installation, run the command below in terminal to verify:
ffmpeg --version
The package in this PPA is backported from Deb Multimedia repository, with few modifications due to different dependency packages between Debian and Ubuntu.
If you found missing features, feel free to leave comment below, I’ll try to update it if possible!
How to Downgrade FFmpeg:
In case you want to downgrade the FFmpeg library to the stock version available in system repository. Open terminal and run command:
sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/ffmpeg9
NOTE: Keep an eye in terminal output before answering yes to confirm! It MAY remove some other useful app packages, though it should be able to install them back later.
I wanted to install this on an ubuntu server, I tried everything but it didn’t pull in the dependencies. I had to apt remove ffmpeg and apt autoremove all dependcies only after that it pulled in the dependencies.
Is it possible to accelerate NVIDIA VP9 WEBM encoding?
sadly no
This PPA doesn’t work currently in 24.04
If you’ve Ubuntu Pro enabled, then it could be the package priority issue.
Ubuntu set the priority of all Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) packages to 510, while all others are 500. In the case, you may specify package source while running
aptcommand (see UPDATE section in the post).That worked, thanks for the quick update!
hello, thanks for your work. I have a question about aac encoder. It is disabled when i install ffmpeg 8. here the output of ffmpeg -encoders | grep -E “nvenc|qsv|svt|aac|libfdk|aom|vpl”
V….D libaom-av1 libaom AV1 (codec av1)
V….. libsvtav1 SVT-AV1(Scalable Video Technology for AV1) encoder (codec av1)
V….. av1_qsv AV1 (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec av1)
V….. h264_qsv H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec h264)
V….. hevc_qsv HEVC (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec hevc)
V….. mjpeg_qsv MJPEG (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec mjpeg)
V….. mpeg2_qsv MPEG-2 video (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec mpeg2video)
V….. vp9_qsv VP9 video (Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration) (codec vp9)
A….D aac AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)
A….D libfdk_aac Fraunhofer FDK AAC (codec aac)
I do not understand that. What could be the problem? And another question, would it be possible to have nvenc hardware accel with ffmpeg 8? how can I do that?
It did build with aac enabled through “libfdk_aac” (except i386 as Ubuntu does not provide the library for this architecture).
I’m not good at trancoding with FFmpeg, but tried in 22.04 & 24.04 (x86_64) via the command below:
ffmpeg -v quiet -codecs | grep aac
DEA.L. aac AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) (decoders: aac aac_fixed libfdk_aac) (encoders: aac libfdk_aac)
D.A.L. aac_latm AAC LATM (Advanced Audio Coding LATM syntax)
For nvenc hardware accel, I’m a bit confused if it’s legal. It requires--enable-nonfree, but the resulting libs and binaries will be unredistributable according to the description.For the
av1_nvenc,h264_nvenc,hevc_nvenc, please try updating the package few hours later. I’m going to rebuild the package to fix the issue.Thanks for this article, you saved me!
In particular, you made the DistroAV plugin for OBS work with NDI HX by letting me know how to easily install ffmpeg >= 7 on Ubuntu 24.04.
Thanks for the PPA, it works great! Would you consider adding support for nnedi3?
Keep up the great work!