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.
When I was a vision engineer at a previous role back in 2022-ish, laptop-class Intel chips used in their SFF NUCs were powerful enough to run small finetuned convolutional nets by dancing across the different on the package: first decode using QSV, and then downsize using the CPU, run the images through an OpenVINO model running on the iGPU, and aggregate results and append metadata using the CPU core. You could have 50% of the hardware in today's high-end security cameras for 10% of the cost.
I have to assume that hardware advancements in the past four years have only pushed the efficiency envelope further.
What made you give up on it? Lack of time, or did you just not find it fun? “Season 2” of games came out last year.
I’d really like the chance to play with one and maybe even try to develop for it. Unfortunately, the price is a bit steep, even more so when considering shipping and taxes to the EU. I kept checking for years (and still do from time to time) to see if they’d sell through a retailer in the EU or if I could get one second-hand here, but it’s looking like that’ll never happen.
I've seen some very recent niche tech demoing fast-refresh e-ink screens but pretty much everything until now has required a noticeable flash to clear the entire screen on update. Which is fine for reading books but not for quick animating in an action game.
Most e-ink displays do not refresh faster than the original GameBoy which was 60fps.
60fps is the speed the PPU pushes pixels to the LCD, not the speed the LCD physically refreshes itself. That part was slow enough you could toggle pixels at 30Hz to simulate more than 4 levels of gray.
I have a Boox e-reader. You can run Firefox on it, you can drag-to-scroll like a phone, there's a lot of ghosting (like the game boy) but it works fine. Now I wish I still had a game boy to compare it to.
Would probably be great for like, text adventures, visual novels, turn based strategy games, etc.
But lcd screens are so cheap I don't even know what the advantage of an e-ink screen would be for this. I was just misremembering what the niche part of the playdate screen was.
Edit: And just to continue the nerdier part of the conversation, the dmg-01's refresh rate was indeed ~60, but it's pixel response time was so bad it really made it feel way slower. I remember when the GBC came out how amazed I was at how clear the games looked. dmg-01 felt like a tiger handheld a lot of the time.
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.
You can very likely do the click-and-hope on your own with a 20 $/month cursor/codex/claude/grok subscription.
edit: actually if you have the weird/exotic hardware you’re in the best position to do so as you can actually test whatever the coding agents would shit out.
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.
Though there is one part I didn’t understand in that interview. They were complaining of being overwhelmed by AI submitted bug reports (fair), including for obscure codecs that must have been used by a couple of users at most. And therefore implying that securing those codecs is low priority/important.
I don’t understand that. To me the severity has nothing to do with how popular is a code path, but whether that code path is accessible to an attacker. If I upload a specially crafted .mkv with a little known codec on YouTube and they use ffmpeg to process it, and I compromise YouTube’s infrastructure that way, it’s a pretty big deal, no matter the popularity of that codec.
That sounds nice in theory, but it seems obvious to me there is a major discrepancy between who is burdened with this responsibility, and who benefits from the result. Given many of these contributors are unpaid volunteers, maybe the infrastructure provider needs to secure FFmpeg in another way, for example by restricting codecs or by running it in a container?
The creator of borg and k8s of course already run such tools for untrusted inputs in containers, but there is also an endless stream of container escapes.
Targeted to what? ffmpeg? Ffmpeg is the OpenSSL of video transcoding, it is used absolutely everywhere. If there is a vulnerability in ffmpeg, any website that processes user supplied videos is vulnerable
Given that it is easy to feed FFMPEG arbitrary input to exploit any vulnerability, popular codecs are very likely to be already secure enough, while unpopular ones are far more dangerous and deserve more attention. It can be assumed that an attacker would target the worst, easiest to exploit codec they can find in the whole of FFMPEG.
It's used by most users, that's what they are saying, it doesn't matter that the file format is obscure.
If you make a video player based on ffmpeg you take input videos. The attacker can share a specially crafted video with the victim. Same kind of attack as sharing word documents.
when it comes to security popularity doesn't matter all that much. If something is not used and insecure then the decision should be to drop the feature, not to ignore the security issue.
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.
For those interested in the work being done, with a bit more details that just the Changelog, I wrote a longer blogpost about the work here: https://jbkempf.com/blog/2026/ffmpeg-9.0/
More details about the ongoing work on Swscale rewrite, on the various Vulkan changes, the assembly detailed and a bit of statistics about this release.
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.
I know this is hyperbole to make a point even this is ridiculous. A lot of YouTubers mess around with their audio/video files, and am sure they have heard of ffmpeg.
Any change in major or minor number indicates a new release branch. And the convention since 5.0 has been to go 0 --> 1 --> 0 --> 1 ... for each new branch.
You could, but there's two big reasons why this isn't useful:
1. The translation system would still have to implement the underlying ideas. For example, your spec might explain "key frames are made by doing a wavelet transform ABC, dropping frequency XYZ, applying Heuristic Alpha and then doing LZ encoding on the result" or something like that. You still need implementations of those specific operations. Having to explain all that stuff in the spec would mean each english language doc would be book length tretsie on encoding. As a result, you don't really gain much by doing this kind of meta-explaination.
2. Video encoding/decoding is something where optimization is extremely important. Writing code that is specific to a single purpose is generally going to be faster than generic code that could be applied to any theoretical format. For example, by knowing the exact size of a transformation matrix, you can decide whether to build a lookup table or calculate on the fly - you can use hardware level features that require knowing exact sizes at build-time etc.
Using good ol' ISO specs (or written specs in general) is such a fun game to play. What the spec says and what hardware/software actually do are not always the same. I worked on a project for a TV manufacturer that provided us the specs for what their chips in their new TV could do. Naturally, we pushed the encoding to the limits of the specs at first, and then had to start dialing things back to what was actually happening. If the spec says max bitrate of Xmpbs, it turns out that it was closer to .85Xmpbs to get decent playback. Or a cable provider's new digital STB that couldn't handle large changes in VBV even thought it was "within spec"
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.
It's frustrating that vibecoding has gotten so pervasive that it's impossible to tell when someone uses LLMs as an awareness-increaser and research assistant, rather than an unreviewable code vomiter. I still appreciate the design of code done via the former strategy, whereas I simply will not rely on the latter.
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
What do you mean you don't remember, your repo is from 8 months ago, this release is from 18 hours ago. And how does "Gemini couldn't get it to work" translate to "it's broken"? It sounds like your vibe-coding session didn't work first try and you haven't tried to understand what the problem was.
You could also look at other repos in github to see what they do to do the same task.
- 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
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