Nice. browsers have supported this for a long time, and it was annoying ffmpeg did not, because that meant a lot of non-browser desktop apps couldn't view them either.
I've been waiting for this feature! Whenever I've encountered an animated WebP, I've had to drop it into ezgif.com to convert it to mp4, now I can just write a quick Bash function to transform it with ffmpeg.
So far, Claude has helped find missing backports for the upcoming 9.0 release."
Although i was under the impression that they ususally preferred hand optimized assembly.
Not sure what their LLM/AI contribution policy looks like compared to other fundamental OSS projects.
> Although i was under the impression that they usually preferred hand optimized assembly.
Using LLMs/agents to do gap analysis and fill boilerplate doesn't rule out also reviewing the output and hand-optimising. That is how the tools should be used (if you aren't being a luddite like me and not using them at all) rather than click-and-hope vibe-coding.
And as a ffmpeg user with some old/weird hardware, I would much prefer click-and-hope support to no support at all. Ideally they’d have the resources for a real live human to hand-code assembly for every codec for every platform, but that’s probably not realistic. I’ll take what I can get and dust off my assembly skills if a click-and-hope implementation is close but not quite enough.
The problem I see is that LLM use deters many potential contributors. I understand that in your use case this is not an issue since you prefer working code over theoretical contributors (as said makes a lot of sense), but I am noticing this in many projects that transitioned hard into an AI dependency. It puts a barrier to some people. If 99% of a project's contributions are via AI, is that project still alive?
Yes, contribution is what keeps a project alive. It's up to the people involved to maintain quality. That's management. Two different things, both important.
In FFmpeg's twitter page it says that several of their developers got six free months of Claude Max 20x plan through Anthropic's Claude for Open Source Program, and that it was used, so far, to help find missing backports for this 9.0 release.
It's incredible how much it does, how quickly it does it, and how it just works every time. Whether I'm trying to deal with gigs of 4k video, embedding multiple subtitles into an mkv file, or just fiddling around with trimming a few seconds of audio off a wav, ffmpeg does it without skipping a beat.
I still hope a future FFmpeg release will make Intel QSV encoding available on Windows laptops where the manufacturer disabled this capability from the ACPI tables. The only way to use it on these laptops is currently FFmpeg on Linux.
Only slightly broken already. Dont remember the details, but Gemini could not this to work just by reading the manual. https://github.com/timonoko/Skipperi
Seems Michael Niedermayer wrote that manually, without AI. Good for him. :P
ffmpeg is great, I think nobody disputes this. I use it in two ways mostly:
1) one, via mpv, and
2) two, as conversion tool primarily
ffmpeg also has many really powerful filters, but these are very confusing to use IMO and not elegant at all. I'd wish we could use some kind of simple meta-language or so, in part similar to virtualdub/avisynth (not necessarily suggesting the same API or DSL here, but just the main idea to think of multimedia data as tangible to manipulation as if it were an object oriented system or datastream system; every time I have to use ffmpeg's filter system, I ask myself if nobody designs any of this ...).
Not a Lex Friedman fan, but I highly recommend the recent podcast he did with two leading engineers (and founder) from the ffmpeg project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nepKKz-MzFM
In a world full of endless AI slop, it is refreshing to see that there are still folks out there hand-rolling assembler code to squeeze out another 5% efficiency.
- Extend AMF Color Converter (vf_vpp_amf) HDR capabilities
- LCEVC track muxing support in MP4 muxer
- Playdate video encoder and muxer
- Add v360_vulkan filter
- HE-AAC 960 decoding (DAB+)
- transpose_cuda filter
- Add AMF Frame Rate Converter (vf_frc_amf) filter
- SMPTE 2094-50 metadata support and passthrough
- ProRes RAW VideoToolbox hwaccel
- APV Vulkan hwaccel
- Animated WebP decoder
- Animated WebP demuxer
- Remove CELT decoding support (doesn't affect Opus CELT)
- Remove ogg/celt parsing
- Bitstream filter to split Dolby Vision multi-layer HEVC
- Add AMF hardware memory mapping support.
- ONNX Runtime DNN backend with GPU execution provider support
- Remove deprecated NVENC options and support for pre-11.1 SDK versions
Nice. browsers have supported this for a long time, and it was annoying ffmpeg did not, because that meant a lot of non-browser desktop apps couldn't view them either.
Oh, wonder what fancy new things this will enable. Any examples in the wild already perhaps?
So far, Claude has helped find missing backports for the upcoming 9.0 release."
Although i was under the impression that they ususally preferred hand optimized assembly. Not sure what their LLM/AI contribution policy looks like compared to other fundamental OSS projects.
Using LLMs/agents to do gap analysis and fill boilerplate doesn't rule out also reviewing the output and hand-optimising. That is how the tools should be used (if you aren't being a luddite like me and not using them at all) rather than click-and-hope vibe-coding.
The problem I see is that LLM use deters many potential contributors. I understand that in your use case this is not an issue since you prefer working code over theoretical contributors (as said makes a lot of sense), but I am noticing this in many projects that transitioned hard into an AI dependency. It puts a barrier to some people. If 99% of a project's contributions are via AI, is that project still alive?
Linux's drivers makes that happen, not ffmpeg; ffmpeg merely calls the API.
Intel's own first party drivers simply follow the ACPI tables, Linux ignores them.
The container formats are defined in a way that could potentially make this possible.
ffmpeg is great, I think nobody disputes this. I use it in two ways mostly:
1) one, via mpv, and 2) two, as conversion tool primarily
ffmpeg also has many really powerful filters, but these are very confusing to use IMO and not elegant at all. I'd wish we could use some kind of simple meta-language or so, in part similar to virtualdub/avisynth (not necessarily suggesting the same API or DSL here, but just the main idea to think of multimedia data as tangible to manipulation as if it were an object oriented system or datastream system; every time I have to use ffmpeg's filter system, I ask myself if nobody designs any of this ...).
In a world full of endless AI slop, it is refreshing to see that there are still folks out there hand-rolling assembler code to squeeze out another 5% efficiency.
8.1 came out 4 months ago on March 16th, 2026
Maybe you're thinking of VLC which has been stuck with a stable v3 release for almost a decade while work on v4 continue?