You might have already seen this, but FFmpeg 8.1 has been released and has some useful news for us it seems:
March 16th, 2026, FFmpeg 8.1 "Hoare"
A new minor release,
FFmpeg 8.1 "Hoare",
is now available for download. Here are some of the highlights:
- Decoders: xHE-AAC Mps212 (experimental) MPEG-H decoding via libmpeghdec
- EXIF Metadata Parsing
- LCEVC: support for parsing and forwarding metadata
- Vulkan compute-based codecs: ProRes encoding and decoding, DPX decoding
- D3D12: D3D12 H.264/AV1 encoding, scale_d3d12, mestimate_d3d12, deinterlace_d3d12 filters
- Rockchip H.264/HEVC hardware encoding
- IAMF: Projection mode Ambisonic Audio Elements muxing and demuxing
- Formats: hxvs demuxer
- Filters: drawvg, vpp_amf
This release features a lot of internal changes and bugfixes. The
groundwork for the upcoming swscale rewrite is progressing.
The Vulkan compute-based codecs, and a few filters, no longer depend
on runtime GLSL compilation, which speeds up their initialization.
A companion post about the Vulkan Compute-based codec implementations has been published on the
Khronos blog,
featuring technical details on the implementations and future plans.
We recommend users, distributors, and system integrators to upgrade unless they use current git master.