FFmpeg 9.0: The Most Significant Update in Years — What's New and Why It Matters

Short summary

FFmpeg 9.0 is a major release with native VVC (H.266) decoding, rewritten AV1 sub-block motion estimation for 12% compression gains, and a completely overhauled filtergraph engine with hardware-accelerated Vulkan/CUDA filters. The update also brings multi-threaded demuxing for MP4/Matroska and 20% memory reduction for long transcoding jobs. Over 2,300 commits from 180 contributors make this the most significant FFmpeg update in years.

• •Native VVC decoding promises 50% bitrate reduction at same quality
• •Rewritten filtergraph with GPU-accelerated filters eliminates CPU round-trips
• •Multi-threaded demuxing and 20% memory reduction for long transcoding jobs

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