FFmpeg 8.0

379 gyan 119 8/22/2025, 3:22:42 PM ffmpeg.org ↗

Comments (119)

np1810 · 45m ago

Thank you FFmpeg developers and contributors!

If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].

In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.

[0]: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

[1]: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan

[2]: https://files.horizon.pics/3f6a47d0-429f-4024-a5e0-e85ceb0f6...

fleabitdev · 1h ago

Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders. The only video codecs widely supported in hardware are H.264, H.265 and AV1, so cross-platform acceleration for other codecs will be very nice to have, even if it's less efficient than fixed-function hardware. The new ProRes encoder already looks useful for a project I'm working on.

> Only codecs specifically designed for parallelised decoding can be implemented in such a way, with more mainstream codecs not being planned for support.

It makes sense that most video codecs aren't amenable to compute shader decoding. You need tens of thousands of threads to keep a GPU busy, and you'll struggle to get that much parallelism when you have data dependencies between frames and between tiles in the same frame.

I wonder whether encoders might have more flexibility than decoders. Using compute shaders to encode something like VP9 (https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/12/13/overview-of-the-v...) would be an interesting challenge.

mtillman · 1h ago

Exciting! I am consistently blown away by the talent of the ffmpeg maintainers. This is fairly hard stuff in my opinion and they do it for free.

droopyEyelids · 43m ago

Could you explain more about it? I assumed the maintainers are doing it as part of their jobs for a company (completely baseless assumption)

refulgentis · 27m ago

Reupvoted you from gray because I don't think that's fair, but I also don't know how much there is to add. As far as why I'm contributing, I haven't been socially involved in the ffmpeg dev community in a decade, but, it is a very reasonable floor to assume it's 80% not full time paid contributors.

pmarreck · 2h ago

Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool.

I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)

Culonavirus · 2h ago

> incantation

FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering

agos · 43m ago

OT, but yours has to be the best username on this site. Props.

bobsmooth · 27m ago

Culón is Spanish for big-bottomed, for anyone else wondering.

mrandish · 1h ago

I'd also include Regex in the list of dark arts incantations.

RedShift1 · 1h ago

I'm ok with regex, but the ffmpeg manpage, it scares me...

Keyframe · 2h ago

with gemini-cli and claude-cli you can now prompt while it prompts ffmpeg, and it does work.

conradev · 2h ago

Yeah, you can give an LLM queries like “make this smaller with libx265 and add the hvc1 tag” or “concatenate these two videos” and it usually crushes it. They have a similar level of mastery over imagemagick, too!

turnsout · 1h ago

Yeah, LLMs have honestly made ffmpeg usable for me, for the first time. The difficulty in constructing commands is not really ffmpeg's fault—it's just an artifact of the power of the tool and the difficulties in shoehorning that power into flags for a single CLI tool. It's just not the ideal human interface to access ffmpeg's functionality. But keeping it CLI makes it much more useful as part of a larger and often automated workflow.

profsummergig · 1h ago

Just seeking a clarification on how this would be done:

One would use gemini-cli (or claude-cli),

- and give a natural language prompt to gemini (or claude) on what processing needs to be done,

- with the correct paths to FFmpeg and the media file,

- and g-cli (or c-cli) would take it from there.

Is this correct?

RedShift1 · 1h ago

Yes. It works amazingly well for ffmpeg.

profsummergig · 1h ago

Thank you.

NSUserDefaults · 2h ago

Curious to see how quickly each LLM picks up the new codecs/options.

stevejb · 2h ago

I use the Warp terminal and I can ask it to run —-help and it figures it out

baq · 2h ago

the canonical (if that's the right word for a 2-year-old technique) solution is to paste the whole manual into the context before asking questions

xnx · 1h ago

Gemini can now load context from a URL in the API (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/url-context), but I'm not sure if that has made it to the web interfaces yet.

jeanlucas · 2h ago

nope, that would be handling tar balls

ffmpeg right after

beala · 1h ago

Tough crowd.

fwiw, `tar xzf foobar.tgz` = "_x_tract _z_e _f_iles!" has been burned into my brain. It's "extract the files" spoken in a Dr. Strangelove German accent

Better still, I recently discovered `dtrx` (https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx) and it's great if you have the ability to install it on the host. It calls the right commands and also always extracts into a subdir, so no more tar-bombs.

If you want to create a tar, I'm sorry but you're on your own.

diggan · 55m ago

I used tar/unzip for decades I think, before moving to 7z which handles all formats I throw at it, and have the same switch for when you want to decompress into a specific directory, instead of having to remember which one of tar and unzip uses -d, and which one uses -C.

"also always extracts into a subdir" sounds like a nice feature though, thanks for sharing another alternative!

fullstop · 1h ago

I have so much of tar memorized. cpio is super funky to me, though.

porridgeraisin · 2h ago

Personally I never understood the problem with tar balls.

The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish.

Examples:

  tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x

You never need anything else for the 99% case.

BeepInABox · 1h ago

For anyone curious, unless you are running a 'tar' binary from the stone ages, just skip the gunzip and cat invocations. Replace .gz with .xz or other well known file ending for different compression.

  Examples:
    tar -cf archive.tar.gz foo bar  # Create archive.tar.gz from files foo and bar.
    tar -tvf archive.tar.gz         # List all files in archive.tar.gz verbosely.
    tar -xf archive.tar.gz          # Extract all files from archive.tar.gz

tombert · 2h ago

Yeah I never really understood why people complain about tar; 99% of what you need from it is just `tar -xvf blah.tar.gz`.

aidenn0 · 2h ago

You for got the -z (or -a with a recent gnutar).

adastra22 · 2h ago

It’s no longer needed. You can leave it out and it auto-detects the file format.

CamperBob2 · 1h ago

What value does tar add over plain old zip? That's what annoys me about .tar files full of .gzs or .zips (or vice versa) -- why do people nest container formats for no reason at all?

I don't use tape, so I don't need a tape archive format.

diggernet · 1h ago

A tar of gzip or zip files doesn't make sense. But gzipping or zipping a tar does.

Gzip only compresses a single file, so .tar.gz lets you bundle multiple files. You can do the same thing with zip, of course, but...

Zip compresses individual files separately in the container, ignoring redundancies between files. But .tar.gz (and .tar.zip, though I've rarely seen that combination) bundles the files together and then compresses them, so can get better compression than .zip alone.

fullstop · 1h ago

zip doesn't retain file ownership or permissions.

diggernet · 1h ago

Good point. And if I remember right, tar allows longer paths than zip.

sdfsdfgsdgg · 2h ago

> tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

Surely you mean -t if you wanna list, t for lisT.

l is for check-Links.

     -l, --check-links
             (c and r modes only) Issue a warning message unless all links to each file are archived.

And you don't need to uncompress separately. tar will detect the correct compression algorithm and decompress on its own. No need for that gunzip intermediate step.

porridgeraisin · 2h ago

> -l

Whoops, lol.

> on its own

Yes.. I'm aware, but that's more options, unnecessary too, just compose tools.

sdfsdfgsdgg · 2h ago

That's the thing. It’s not more options. During extraction it picks the right algorithm automatically, without you needing to pass another option.

drivers99 · 2h ago

Except it's tar -t to list, not -l

porridgeraisin · 2h ago

Whoops, lol. Well that's unfortunate.

bigstrat2003 · 2h ago

The problem is it's very non-obvious and thus is unnecessarily hard to learn. Yes, once you learn the incantations they will serve you forever. But sit a newbie down in front of a shell and ask them to extract a file, and they struggle because the interface is unnecessarily hard to learn.

encom · 2h ago

It's very similar to every other CLI program, I really don't understand what kind of usability issue you're implying is unique to tar?

mrguyorama · 1h ago

As has been clearly demonstrated in this very thread, why is "Please list what files are in this archive" the option "-t"?

Principle of least surprise and all that.

jeanlucas · 2h ago

it was just a reference to xkcd#1168

I wasn't expecting the downvotes for an xkcd reference

sho_hn · 2h ago

nope, it's using `find`.

agys · 2h ago

LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

xandrius · 1h ago

Had to do exactly that with a bunch of screenshots I took but happened to include a bunch of unnecessary parts of the screen.

A prompt to ChatGPT and a command later and all were nicely cropped in a second.

The dread of doing it by hand and having it magically there a minute later is absolutely mind blowing. Even just 5 years ago, I would have just done it manually as it would have definitely taken more to write the code for this task.

Barrin92 · 1h ago

it can work but it's far from science fiction. LLMs tend to produce extremely subpar if not buggy ffmpeg code. They'll routinely do things like put the file parameter before the start time which needlessly decodes the entire video, produce wrong bitrates, re-encode audio needlessly, and so on.

If you don't care enough about potential side effects to read the manual it's fine, but a dream UX it is not because I'd argue that includes correctness.

euroderf · 35m ago

Are you accusing Blade Runner of infringing FFmpeg IP ?

jjcm · 2h ago

LLMs are a great interface for ffmpeg. There are tons of tools out there that can help you run it with natural language. Here's my personal script: https://github.com/jjcm/llmpeg

qmr · 2h ago

Exciting news.

https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM?si=b_vzB4o87ArcYNfq

outside1234 · 2h ago

Is this satire, serious, or both. :)

Dwedit · 2h ago

Has anyone made a good GUI frontend for accessing the various features of FFMPEG? Sometimes you just want to remux a video without doing any transcoding, or join several video and audio streams together (same codecs).

filmgirlcw · 35m ago

For Mac users, ffWorks [1] is an amazing frontend for FFmpeg that surfaces most of the features but with a decent GUI. It’s batchable and you can setup presets too. It’s one of my favorite apps and the developer is very responsive.

Handbrake and Losslssscut are great too. But in addition to donating to FFmpeg, I pay for ffWorks because it really does offer a lot of value to me. I don’t think there is anything close to its polish on other platforms, unfortunately.

[1]: https://www.ffworks.net/index.html

joenot443 · 2h ago

Handbrake fits the bill, I think!

It's a great tool. Little long in the tooth these days, but gets the job done.

kevinsync · 1h ago

Seconded, HandBrake[0] is great for routine tasks / workflows. The UI could be simplified just a tad for super duper simple stuff (ex. ripping a multi-episode tv show disc but don't care about disc extras? you kind of have to hunt and poke based on stream length to decide which parts are the actual episodes. The app itself could probably reliably guess and present you with a 1-click 'queue these up' flow for instance) but otherwise really a wonderful tool!

Past that, I'm on the command line haha

[0] https://handbrake.fr

selectodude · 1h ago

Handbrake receives pretty regular updates.

patapong · 1h ago

I have found the best front-end to be ChatGPT. It is very good at figuring out the commands needed to accomplish something in FFmpeg, from my natural description of what I want to do.

jazzyjackson · 1h ago

check out https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

pseudosavant · 2h ago

I haven't used a GUI I like, but LLMs like ChatGPT have been so good for solving this for me. I tell it exactly what I need it to do and it produces the ffmpeg command to do it.

onehair · 52m ago

There is handbrake, vidcoder and all sorts of frontend.

mrguyorama · 1h ago

Shotcut is an open source Video production toolkit that is basically just a really nice interface for generating ffmpeg commands.

https://www.shotcut.org/

toxicosmos · 38m ago

Shotcut uses the MLT Multimedia Framework. It is not just a "really nice interface for generating ffmpeg commands"

https://www.mltframework.org/

ricardojoaoreis · 2h ago

You can use mkvtoolnix for that and it has a GUI

TiredOfLife · 1h ago

ChatGPT and other llms

cubefox · 1h ago

Pretty sure ChatGPT counts as a CLI, not as a GUI.

AlienRobot · 1h ago

It would need to be a non-linear editor node-based editor. Pretty much all open source video editors are just FFMPEG frontends, e.g. Kdenlive.

xnx · 2h ago

Changelog: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/Changelog

larodi · 2h ago

Is anyone else on the opinion that ffmpeg now ranks 4th as the most used lib after ssl, zlib, and sqlite... given video is like omnipresent in 2025?

_kb · 57m ago

You can pull the nix logs from here: https://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/main/metrics/fastly/READ...

Could be an interesting data source to explore that opinion.

zaik · 1h ago

You can check, at least for Arch Linux: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages

npteljes · 1h ago

It's up there in the hall of fame, that's for sure!

pledg · 2h ago

libcurl?

encom · 1h ago

libc :D

joshuat · 2h ago

Some Netflix devs are going to have a busy sprint

elektor · 2h ago

For those out of the loop, can you please explain your comment?

henryfjordan · 1h ago

Netflix uses FFMPEG, will have to update

TeeMassive · 42m ago

And some influencers ;)

javier2 · 32m ago

What is the performance like for AV1 / h264 in vulkan vs not vulkan?

oldgregg · 2h ago

LLMs have really made ffmpeg implementations easy-- the command line options are so expansive and obscure it's so nice to just tell it what you want and have it spit out a crazy ffmpeg command.

instagraham · 1h ago

I remember saving my incantation to download and convert a youtube playlist (in the form of a txt file with a list of URLs) and this being the only way to back up Chrome music bookmark folders.

Then it stopped working until I updated youtube-dl and then that stopped working once I lost the incantation :<

noman-land · 1h ago

Check out yt-dlp. It works great.

TeeMassive · 40m ago

yt-dlp works really well, and not only for YouTube ;)

ok123456 · 1h ago

Finally! RealVideo 6 support.

shmerl · 33m ago

Nice! Looking forward to try WHIP/WebRTC based streaming to replace SRT.

Sean-Der · 22m ago

What are you using WHIP against today?

I am curious about adoption and features that would make big difference to users :)

JadoJodo · 2h ago

I don't know a huge amount about video encoding, but I presume this is one of those libraries outlined in xkcd 2347[0]?

[0] - https://xkcd.com/2347/

0xbeefcab · 2h ago

Yeah, basically anytime a video or audio is being recorded, played, or streamed its from ffmpeg. It runs on a couple planets [0], and on most devices (maybe?)

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9

deaddodo · 1h ago

FFMpeg is definitely fairly ubiquitous, but you are overstating its universality quite a bit. There are alternatives that utilize Windows/macOS's native media frameworks, proprietary software that utilizes bespoke frameworks, and libraries that function independently of ffmpeg that offer similar functionality.

That being said, if you put down a pie chart of media frameworks (especially for transcoding or muxing), ffmpeg would have a significant share of that pie.

neckro23 · 2h ago

Not necessarily. A lot of video software either leverages the Windows/MacOS system codecs (ex. Media Player Classic, Quicktime) or proprietary vendor codecs (Adobe/Blackmagic).

Linux doesn't really have a system codec API though so any Linux video software you see (ex. VLC, Handbrake) is almost certainly using ffmpeg under the hood (or its foundation, libavcodec).

aidenn0 · 2h ago

Pretty much.

It also was originally authored by the same person who did lzexe, tcc, qemu, and the current leader for the large text compression benchmark.

Oh, and for most of the 2010's there was a fork due to interpersonal issues on the team.

_kb · 55m ago

It's the big flat one at the bottom.

tombert · 1h ago

Yeah I think pretty much everything that involves video on Linux or FreeBSD in 2025 involves FFmpeg or Gstreamer, usually the former.

It’s exceedingly good software though, and to be fair I think it’s gotten a fair bit of sponsorship and corporate support.

zhengyi13 · 2h ago

Yes, this is a pretty fundamental building block; just not so rickety.

0xbeefcab · 2h ago

Linking a previous discussion to FFMPEG's inclusion of whisper in this release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647

This seemed to be interesting to users of this site. tl;dr they added support for whisper, an OpenAI model for speech-to-text, which should allow autogeneration of captions via ffmpeg

bachittle · 1h ago

Heads up: Whisper support depends on how your FFmpeg was built. Some packages will not include it yet. Check with `ffmpeg -buildconf` or `ffmpeg -filters | grep whisper`. If you compile yourself, remember to pass `--enable-whisper` and give the filter a real model path.

Culonavirus · 2h ago

these days most movies and series already come out with captions, but you know what does not, given the vast amount of it?... ;)

yep, finally the deaf will able to read what people are saying in a porno!

0xbeefcab · 2h ago

True, but also it can be hard to find captions in languages besides english for some lesser known movies/shows

yieldcrv · 1h ago

And also pirated releases are super weird and all over the place with subtitles and video player compatibility

This could streamline things

bobsmooth · 22m ago

There's websites where you can download subtitles. Usually from very obviously pirated released.

josteink · 2h ago

Nice! Anyone have any idea how and when this will affect downstream projects like yt-dlp, jellyfin, etc? Especially with regard to support for HW-acceleration?

waihtis · 1h ago

T3.gg in shambles

ekianjo · 2h ago

Vulkan based encoders and decoders are super exciting!

oblio · 2h ago

First of all: congratulations!!!

Secondly, just curious: any insiders here?

What changed? I see the infrastructure has been upgraded, this seems like a big release, etc. I guess there was a recent influx of contributors? A corporate donation? Something else?

exprez135 · 2h ago

Not an insider, but I noticed that there is now a filter for using Whisper (C++) for audio transcription [1]. It looks like you provide the path to a model file [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp

[2]: https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/13ce36fef98a...

perihelions · 2h ago

You missed out on the thread!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647 ("FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support (ffmpeg.org)"—9 days ago, 331 comments)

ukuina · 2h ago

This is big news if it means realtime subtitle generation.

ranger_danger · 2h ago

in my experience whisper (at least on my 3070 Ti) is not capable of high quality real-time transcription. A few seconds per second of audio, maybe.

y_sellami · 2h ago

about time vulkan got into the game.

brcmthrowaway · 2h ago

How much ARM acceleration vs x8664?

zzzeek · 1h ago

ffmpeg is a treasure to the open source and audio technology communities. The tool cuts right through all kinds of proprietary and arcane roadblocks presented by various codecs and formats and it's clear a tremendous amount of work goes into keeping it all working. The CLI is of course quite opaque and the documentation for various features is often terse, but it's still the only tool on any platform anywhere that will always get you what you need for video and audio processing without ever running up against some kind of commercial paywall.

jeanlucas · 2h ago

cheers for one more release, hope it gets attention and necessary funding

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FFmpeg 8.0

Comments (119)