from Hacker News

FFmpeg 4.0 released

by frakturfreund on 4/20/18, 9:33 PM with 61 comments

  • by gusfoo on 4/20/18, 10:10 PM

    If you're reading this, FFmpeg developers, please accept my thanks for your work. You have become a "Category Killer"[1] in command-line video tomfoolery.

    [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-baza...

  • by niftich on 4/20/18, 9:58 PM

    Lots of hardware acceleration:

    - Intel QSV-accelerated MJPEG encoding

    - NVIDIA NVDEC-accelerated H.264, HEVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1/2/4, VC1, VP8/9 hwaccel decoding

    - Intel QSV-accelerated overlay filter

    - OpenCL overlay filter

    - VAAPI MJPEG and VP8 decoding

    - AMD AMF H.264 and HEVC encoders

    - VideoToolbox HEVC encoder and hwaccel

    - VAAPI-accelerated ProcAmp (color balance), denoise and sharpness filters

  • by Cogito on 4/21/18, 12:47 AM

    Love ffmpeg!

    I was trying to do something the other day and couldn’t figure it out, if anyone has any ideas.

    The end goal is to provide a set of video files, with time stamps for each, splicing them into one file while removing parts I don’t want.

    That is straightforward enough, as long as you’re willing to re-encode the whole file. Otherwise, it seems like ffmpeg is restricted to make cuts at key frames.

    It’s rare for the key frame to be placed at the exact spot I would want to make a cut, so the section of the video around the cut would need to be re-encoded. Ideally that would be the only part hat is re-encoded - everything else would be a a straight transcode from key frame to key frame.

    I believe this is called ‘smart rendering’, and the pages I could find in the past said ffmpeg isn’t really suited for it, or it’s very difficult.

    Does anyone know if that has changed recently, or have found a way to do it?

  • by aleksi on 4/21/18, 9:53 AM

    Is anyone follows https://libav.org development? I was under the impression they merged back with FFmpeg when Michael Niedermayer resigned as leader. Now I see they still make their own releases. So merge ultimately did not happen?

    EDIT: Just found that FFmpeg merges (almost) all libav.org changes: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/doc/libav-merge...

  • by fulafel on 4/21/18, 9:01 AM

    I hope Ubuntu gets better at updating FFmpeg by bringing it in from the "universe" category of unsupported packages. Or second best option, stops shipping it.

    Just this week there was an update showing that they had nearly a year-long window of vulnerability due to out of date version[1].

    A media format christmas tree like this has really a lot of vulnerabilities & exposes the user to them fairly directly through media files.

    [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg/+bug/169778...

  • by jcampbell1 on 4/20/18, 10:23 PM

    FFmpeg has been an amazing tool. I don't know if this is helpful, but using static linked builds has been a big time saver for me. Patent issues can make it tough to get a feature complete install. The ones below have worked amazingly well.

    https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/

  • by slederer on 4/20/18, 9:49 PM

    Awesome, initial AV1 support!

  • by Maxious on 4/21/18, 1:39 AM

    > Removed the ffserver program

    Lots of good times with ffserver although thankfully https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module seems to meet the same use cases and exec ffmpeg under the hood.

  • by kbumsik on 4/20/18, 10:59 PM

    > native aptX and aptX HD encoder and decoder

    Sounds great. Is there any meaning to Linux computers that don’t support aptX? Also I am wondering how it is posssible to include the aptX codec since its license term is against GPL?

  • by webkike on 4/20/18, 10:28 PM

    Thank you ffmpeg contributers. I want to let you know the famous Xzibit entrances video (https://youtu.be/2dkN0YIBjEM) was made in no smart part thanks to ffmpeg.

  • by Hello71 on 4/20/18, 10:23 PM

    Hopefully this means the imminent packaging of mpv 0.28 with Vulkan support.

  • by dvfjsdhgfv on 4/21/18, 10:01 AM

    It's a great pity ffserver has been removed.

  • by phoenix24 on 4/21/18, 2:59 PM

    Quick Question,

    For a personal project, I would like to generate videos to visualize the evolution of our git repository.

    Is ffmpeg the best approach to programmatically create videos? What is the state of java, python or go bindings for such a usecase?

    Or should I use OpenGL for this particular use?

    I'm new to this, so any help and guidance would be great for me to get started.

    Thanks!

  • by floatboth on 4/21/18, 11:28 AM

    Nice to see a stable release. mpv was already requiring >3.4 (which meant git master) but many other programs did not compile with ffmpeg master...

    > support LibreSSL (via libtls)

    Wow, libtls! Nice.

  • by jesuslop on 4/21/18, 7:02 AM

    What does the "entropy video filter" do?

  • by always_good on 4/21/18, 12:58 PM

    Has anyone ever written an ffmpeg script that could break a video apart into interesting cuts?

    Someone posted a brilliant script in one of these ffmpeg posts but I can't find it for the life of me. I used it to create "trailers" of my media collection.

  • by no_u on 4/21/18, 12:01 AM

    Couldn't find a PPA or a docker image for it, would I need to install it from source?

    I would really like to test AV1 with it.