One of the best open-source tools out there. I'm a frequent user of Plex, Jellyfin, Tunarr, local music files, etc. I use it weekly to extract subtitles, trim videos, convert music formats, and remove audio tracks. After writing the previous paragraph, I realized I've never donated to the project; it's time to change that.

• mihaelm

  today at 5:54 PM

  It's a lower-level component in so much stuff we're not even aware of.

  • andrew_lettuce

    today at 7:33 PM

    Yep. Which is a great architecture IMO. Simple, performant and flexible: choose 3

  • cybrox

    today at 7:16 PM

    FFmpeg is a prime single-block-everything-is-built-on xkcd example.

Changelog:

ffprobe -codec option

EXIF Metadata Parsing

gfxcapture: Windows.Graphics.Capture based window/monitor capture

hxvs demuxer for HXVS/HXVT IP camera format

MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding via mpeghdec

D3D12 H.264 encoder

drawvg filter via libcairo

ffmpeg CLI tiled HEIF support

D3D12 AV1 encoder

ProRes Vulkan hwaccel

DPX Vulkan hwaccel

Rockchip H.264/HEVC hardware encoder

Add vf_scale_d3d12 filter

JPEG-XS parser

JPEG-XS decoder and encoder through libsvtjpegxs

JPEG-XS raw bitstream muxer and demuxer

IAMF Projection mode Ambisonic Audio Elements muxing and demuxing

Add vf_mestimate_d3d12 filter

xHE-AAC Mps212 decoding support (experimental)

Remove the old HLS protocol handler

Vulkan compute codec optimizations

swscale Vulkan support

LCEVC metadata bitstream filter

Add vf_deinterlace_d3d12 filter

ffprobe: only show refs field in stream section when reading frames

ProRes Vulkan encoder

LCEVC parser

LCEVC enhancement layer exporting in MPEG-TS

• yboris

  today at 3:20 PM

  TIL: JPEG XS - an image and video codec that offers both visually and mathematically lossless quality for low latency implementations.

  Additionally, JPEG XS compressed content is indistinguishable from the original uncompressed content.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS

  • jamesfmilne

    today at 6:09 PM

    I've had great results using JPEG-XS to transport video for colour grading in feature film & TV post production. At 3:1 or 4:1 compression ratio is effectively lossless.

    It is patent-encumbered though, you have to pay license fees to deploy it.

  • voidUpdate

    today at 3:59 PM

    Isn't the point of JPEG to have lossy compression for your photos that still looks fine? As opposed to something like PNG, which has lossless compression

    • johntb86

      today at 4:25 PM

      "JPEG" is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, an ISO/ITU group that creates a lot of imaging standards. The JPEG image format you're thinking of is only one of the formats they've created.

    • bydo

      today at 4:24 PM

      The Joint Photographic Experts Group manages many standards, generally each called "JPEG [something]". The one we most commonly call "JPEG" is just one of them.

    • today at 5:23 PM

    • pjc50

      today at 4:18 PM

      Reading that it looks like the point of JPEG-XS is to have near-lossless compression for raw photo and video data while having extremely high throughput.

      • zamadatix

        today at 4:46 PM

        JPEG XS supports either near lossless or truly lossless encoding depending on encoder configuration.

  • Almondsetat

    today at 7:43 PM

    Not royalty free, unfortunately.

  • CharlesW

    today at 3:57 PM

    > Additionally, JPEG XS compressed content is indistinguishable from the original uncompressed content.

    It can be indistinguishable, as long as you stick with lossless or very low compression ratios. It falls apart at typical JPEG XL compression ratios.

  • iso1631

    today at 3:57 PM

    We use JXS when latency is critical. Most h24/265 decodes will have a 10 frame glass-glass delay, JXS drops that to 3 or 4, at a cost of bandwidth (our UHD jxs streams are 1.5gbit rather than 200mbit for hevc)

    • jamesfmilne

      today at 6:07 PM

      Yeah, we've been deploying JPEG-XS for high bitrate streaming for a while.

      A lot of our customers are moving their grading systems into data centres and streaming the images over IP back to their grading suites.

      I've got it down to less than 1 frame for encode-transport-decode, but you've still got to copy the image to an SDI card and wait for that to clock out.

• bob1029

  today at 3:28 PM

  > gfxcapture: Windows.Graphics.Capture based window/monitor capture

  > This source provides low overhead capture of application windows or entire monitors. The filter outputs hardware frames in d3d11 format; use hwdownload,format= if system memory frames are required.

  This would strongly alter my plans if I were to develop an OSS Discord alternative. Chromium originally looked like a better core to start with largely due to its mature screen capture API. WebRTC is the other big thing, but there are other ways to do that. Native desktop apps (i.e., not browser based) are beginning to look much more compelling to me now.

  • pjc50

    today at 4:16 PM

    If you were doing this, consider cribbing from https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/tree/master/plugins... which offers a variety of solutions including some rather exciting looking process injection (called "game" there).

    I wonder if "entire chat app functions as OBS plugin" would work? Would solve the AV streaming side of the functionality.

  • lostmsu

    today at 3:31 PM

    You could always use Windows.Graphics.Capture directly.

• HelloUsername

  today at 6:31 PM

  Wait, are you https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/ ?

> Oh there's a new version of ffmpeg, I'll just quickly build it from source... no I can't wait I'll download the binary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM

• asveikau

  today at 4:42 PM

  I tend to build ffmpeg from source because package managers don't usually include support for patented codecs.

  (Yes I know there are repos to get binaries for some, things like deb-multimedia.)

• Amorymeltzer

  today at 5:49 PM

  For anyone vaguely familiar with ffmpeg, don't sleep on this video. Quite funny, and everything from `yadif` (which I dealt with today!) to mkvtoolnix to "But then it will explode if you have an apostrophe in your file name. Because it doesn't understand that."

• shevy-java

  today at 4:47 PM

  Building ffmpeg itself from source is actually quite easy.

  The hardest part IMO is getting the necessary codecs to work; this can take a little while. If you know what audio and video codecs you want and need, and if you get them installed properly, then compiling ffmpeg is really simple and straightforward. It works almost always for me, and I have compiled ffmpeg from source for like +10 or even +15 years.

  For reference purposes, my current configure options are:

    ./configure --prefix=/usr/ --enable-gnutls --enable-gpl --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libaom --enable-libopus --enable-libspeex --enable-libtwolame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-shared --enable-version3 --extra-libs=\"-ldl\" --disable-doc --disable-libopenjpeg --disable-libpulse --disable-static
  

  Probably more codecs could be added, and some options may not be necessary anymore (I changed this last ... years ago, too), but this works for the most part fairly well.

  One focus I have is mostly on a few .mp4 files, and for these I think you kind of want x264 x265 and so forth (I think one more codec from google too or so). But it is really quite trivial once you are past the codecs step. You can also start simple with just a few codecs, e. g. one good audio codec and one good video codec. One reason I like to have ffmpeg support many codecs is so I can use mpv, which in itself is really awesome; I like it more than vlc, which is also ok though.

  • dylan604

    today at 5:41 PM

    quite easy? like learning to draw an owl?

    getting the stock ffmpeg to compile/build might be "easy", but once you start adding on additional codecs and other features that get you into dependency nightmares "easy" is not the word I would use. I have not been able to use the stock ffmpeg since forever. for example, i see no openssl enabled in your config. I see no freetype. I see you've disabled openjpeg. clearly, you and i use ffmpeg differently which just goes to show your "easy" is very misleading

    • ninju

      today at 6:40 PM

      https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:How_to_draw_an_owl_m...

      • dylan604

        today at 7:53 PM

        "fill in the rest of the details" is the politest way I've ever seen this, and it really lames it up.

• blell

  today at 6:35 PM

  emerge ffmpeg ;)

The FATE regression test suite improvements are the part I'm most interested in here. FFmpeg's test coverage has historically been pretty sparse for edge cases — things like seeking in fragmented MP4s or specific codec interactions. More automated regression testing means fewer 'works on my machine' surprises when upgrading between versions in CI pipelines. The new filter graph syntax changes are going to break some scripts though; already saw a few people in the issue tracker hit the deprecated options.

Khronos published a post on the Vulkan compute codecs in FFmpeg: https://www.khronos.org/blog/video-encoding-and-decoding-wit...

• altairprime

  today at 5:01 PM

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410271

• rixrax

  today at 5:23 PM

  Is there a 'HW' guide to show the expected performance of Vulkan compute codecs anywhere?

FFmpeg is really great. The only wish I'd have is for the usage to become simpler - both for regular stuff, but also for advanced filtering.

If anyone remembers, avisynth was pretty cool back in the days. You could kind of script video/audio manipulations, a bit like a UNIX/Linux pipe, but kind of simpler, in my opinion. FFmpeg allows for many similar operations, but remembering anything here is ... hard. I'd love for the whole usage API to become much simpler, but it seems nobody among the ffmpeg dev team is considering this. :(

I can't be the only one with that wish though ...

It does not diminish ffmpeg being so great in general, but I think it could be better.

• dylan604

  today at 5:52 PM

  Once I got over the -filter_complex is well, complex phobia, it isn't that bad. The command line makes it look daunting to be sure. But thinking of it as the name suggests of "filter chains" makes it less daunting. It is still cumbersome as every thing needs to be in the command.

  Debugging commands gets hairy the more complex they get but you'll get muscle memory on how to search/replace to make line breaks to make it easier, similar to breaking up gnarly SQL. The worst part about debugging is the error messages can be misleading when it interprets the filter chain incorrectly because of some issue you've typoed in there somewhere. Even those start to become recognizable as "it thinks this, which means I probably messed up this other thing instead". To be fair, I work with ffmpeg daily using some commands that make your eyes bleed. So for someone using it every now and then, the practice from repetitive use just takes longer.

  Also, saving things as shell scripts helps a lot. A simple script that does the same thing with a few adjustable params can be done with %1, %2 usage or even cleaner with getopts. You can then change small things within a tested complex command.

• daneel_w

  today at 5:12 PM

  If you're just looking for an easier solution for encoding video ("regular stuff") then Handbrake is the go-to tool for that.

• qingcharles

  today at 5:19 PM

  One of the best uses of LLMs is to help find the right command line options for tools like ffmpeg.

  • axus

    today at 5:37 PM

    It won't always give you a perfect answer the first time, but it's much better than memorizing the manual or interpreting a forum discussion. Haven't used it for ffmpeg, but lots of other command lines.

    • andrew_lettuce

      today at 7:36 PM

      Because ffmpeg is built on the Unix chained utility philosophy I find ai is also good at building scripts the use it as well

• jcims

  today at 7:30 PM

  If there’s one thing I’ve entirely handed over to our AI overlords it’s the ffmpeg command line.

How much of this release was done by to corporate/big tech employees?

• overfeed

  today at 5:29 PM

  I have no idea how much they contribute back, but pretty much every (big) tech company that does any media transcoding uses ffmpeg.

I wouldn't get too excited about rockchip hw encoding. It's rkmpp based, not an upstream solution. You'd need Rockchip kernel for this, I guess.

• stevemk14ebr

  today at 4:33 PM

  It's still a big deal, you had to compile ffmpeg yourself before

nice job