February 28th, 2023, FFmpeg 6.0 "Von Neumann"

A new major release, FFmpeg 6.0 "Von Neumann", is now available for download. This release has many new encoders and decoders, filters, ffmpeg CLI tool improvements, and also, changes the way releases are done. All major releases will now bump the version of the ABI. We plan to have a new major release each year. Another release-specific change is that deprecated APIs will be removed after 3 releases, upon the next major bump. This means that releases will be done more often and will be more organized.

New decoders featured are Bonk, RKA, Radiance, SC-4, APAC, VQC, WavArc and a few ADPCM formats. QSV and NVenc now support AV1 encoding. The FFmpeg CLI (we usually reffer to it as ffmpeg.c to avoid confusion) has speed-up improvements due to threading, as well as statistics options, and the ability to pass option values for filters from a file. There are quite a few new audio and video filters, such as adrc, showcwt, backgroundkey and ssim360, with a few hardware ones too. Finally, the release features many behind-the-scenes changes, including a new FFT and MDCT implementation used in codecs (expect a blog post about this soon), numerous bugfixes, better ICC profile handling and colorspace signalling improvement, introduction of a number of RISC-V vector and scalar assembly optimized routines, and a few new improved APIs, which can be viewed in the doc/APIchanges file in our tree. A few submitted features, such as the Vulkan improvements and more FFT optimizations will be in the next minor release, 6.1, which we plan to release soon, in line with our new release schedule. Some highlights are:

Radiance HDR image support

ddagrab (Desktop Duplication) video capture filter

ffmpeg -shortest_buf_duration option

ffmpeg now requires threading to be built

ffmpeg now runs every muxer in a separate thread

Add new mode to cropdetect filter to detect crop-area based on motion vectors and edges

VAAPI decoding and encoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9

WBMP (Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap) image format

a3dscope filter

bonk decoder and demuxer

Micronas SC-4 audio decoder

LAF demuxer

APAC decoder and demuxer

Media 100i decoders

DTS to PTS reorder bsf

ViewQuest VQC decoder

backgroundkey filter

nvenc AV1 encoding support

MediaCodec decoder via NDKMediaCodec

MediaCodec encoder

oneVPL support for QSV

QSV AV1 encoder

QSV decoding and encoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9

showcwt multimedia filter

corr video filter

adrc audio filter

afdelaysrc audio filter

WADY DPCM decoder and demuxer

CBD2 DPCM decoder

ssim360 video filter

ffmpeg CLI new options: -stats_enc_pre[_fmt], -stats_enc_post[_fmt], -stats_mux_pre[_fmt]

hstack_vaapi, vstack_vaapi and xstack_vaapi filters

XMD ADPCM decoder and demuxer

media100 to mjpegb bsf

ffmpeg CLI new option: -fix_sub_duration_heartbeat

WavArc decoder and demuxer

CrystalHD decoders deprecated

SDNS demuxer

RKA decoder and demuxer

filtergraph syntax in ffmpeg CLI now supports passing file contents as option values

hstack_qsv, vstack_qsv and xstack_qsv filters

We strongly recommend users, distributors, and system integrators to upgrade unless they use current git master.