FFmpeg 9.0 'Lei' Released: Major ABI Break, Rewritten swscale, and GPU-Accelerated Codecs
FFmpeg 9.0, a major release, arrives with over 2200 commits from 160+ authors. It features a complete rewrite of the swscale library, introducing a new operation-based architecture with CPU (x86, AArch64) and Vulkan GPU backends. Notable additions include native animated WebP decoding, AV1 hierarchical B-frames for NVENC, a Playdate video encoder, and a new low-latency decoding API. The release also brings GPU-accelerated FFV1 encoding/decoding via Vulkan, Dolby Vision Profile 7 support, and a new demuxer command API for RTSP.
The new swscale architecture is completely different: every conversion is decomposed into a list of elementary operations, an optimizer simplifies and splits that list, and a backend then compiles it into a chain of kernels.