FFmpeg, the popular free open-source multimedia library, released new major 8.0 version almost a year since the last 7.1.

The new FFmpeg 8.0, codename “Huffman”, added native decoding support for Samsung’s Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, Apple’s ProRes RAW, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, RealVideo 6.0, G.728, and ADPCM IMA Xbox.

It also added encoding support for APV (via libopenapv wrapper), libx265 alpha layer, and animated JPEG XL images (through libjxl).

FFmpeg 8.0 also introduced new decoders and encoders based on pure Vulkan compute implementation. It’s a cross-platform, open standard APIs, allowing programs to use GPU hardware accelerated rendering, calculating, and decoding, which can provide very significant speedups on some hardware.

So far, the Vulkan compute-based codecs only supports FFv1 (encoding and decoding) and ProRes RAW (decode only), while ProRes (encode + decode) and VC-2 (encode + decode) will be available in next minor release.

The release as well improved some codecs support by introducing hardware accelerated decoding support for VP9 (Vulkan), VVC (VAAPI), and hardware accelerated encoding support for AV1 (Vulkan). And, both decoding and encoding (hardware accelerated) for the OpenHarmony H264/5 video codecs.

Other changes include improved VVC (aka H.266) support via all content of SCC (Screen Content Coding), including IBC (Inter Block Copy), Palette Mode and ACT (Adaptive Color Transform), and following more:

• New filters: colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, Whisper, and others.
• APV parser
• APV in MP4/ISOBMFF muxing and demuxing
• VVC in Matroska,
• CENC AV1 support in MP4 muxer.
• Enhanced FLV v2: Multitrack audio/video, modern codec support.
• set default prediction method to PAETH for pngenc.

In addition, FFmpeg 8.0 also dropped OpenSSL < 1.1.0, removed yasm support (users need to use nasm), and deprecated OpenMAX encoders. For more, see the official release note.

Get FFmpeg 8.0

FFmpeg only provides the source tarball which is available to download at its website via the link below:

For Linux, besides waiting for your Distro to update the FFmpeg package, Deb Multimedia repository has built the 8.0 release for Debian experimental.

UPDATE: For Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 25.04, FFmpeg 8.0 is available via this unofficial PPA.

NOTE: The PPA contains many updated libraries that may break dependencies! And, the packages are NOT well tested. Use at your own risk!

To add the PPA and install FFmpeg 8.0, run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/ffmpeg8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -t "o=LP-PPA-ubuntuhandbook1-ffmpeg8" ffmpeg