FFmpeg 9.0 ‘Lei’ brings native animated WebP decoding, expanded Vulkan and CUDA GPU acceleration, Apple ProRes RAW, and GPU-driven AI execution via ONNX Runtime.
FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed ‘Lei’, was officially released on August 4, 2026, as the latest major stable version of the open source multimedia framework. The release introduces the v360_vulkan filter to offload 360-degree and panoramic video processing to graphic processing units (GPUs), alongside Vulkan hardware acceleration for encoding and decoding Samsung’s advanced professional video (APV) codec.
NVIDIA adds the transpose_cuda filter for GPU-bound frame rotation. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) expands its advanced media framework (AMF) support with a frame-rate converter (vf_frc_amf), video quality enhancer (vf_vqe_amf), extended (high dynamic range) HDR capabilities for the AMF colour converter (vf_vpp_amf), and hardware memory mapping support. Apple introduces VideoToolbox-accelerated decoding for Apple ProRes RAW.
The deep neural network (DNN) backend now supports GPU execution providers via ONNX Runtime, enabling artificiall intelligence (AI) models for super-resolution, upscaling, and background segmentation to execute entirely on the GPU. FFmpeg 9.0 also introduces native decoders and demuxers for animated WebP files, removing the dependency on external libraries such as libwebp.
Additional container and broadcast capabilities include LCEVC (low complexity enhancement video coding) track muxing in the MP4 muxer, HE-AAC 960 decoding for DAB+ digital radio compatibility, a bitstream filter for splitting Dolby Vision multi-layer HEVC streams, and SMPTE 2094-50 dynamic metadata passthrough. A dedicated video encoder and muxer for the Playdate gaming console has also been added.
Deprecated components have been removed, including standalone constrained energy lapped transform (CELT) decoding support and Ogg/CELT parsing, which does not affect Opus audio. Support for NVIDIA Video Codec software developer’s kit (SDK) versions prior to 11.1 has been dropped alongside deprecated NVENC options.
