from Hacker News

FFmpeg 7.1 release: a tons of codecs

by jbk on 9/30/24, 9:05 AM with 46 comments

• by webdevver on 9/30/24, 10:35 AM

  chatgpt has revolutionized ffmpeg for me. i had no idea how powerful it was and the crazy oneliners you could do - i had this small project to make a moving collage of video frames, and chatgpt produced the crazy invocation for it. it even showed me how to use intel quicksync.

  the point is, there is no way i would have been able to figure out the command line myself. it still trips up every now and then (at which point im often screwed), but i can atleast finally use the tool.

• by IntelMiner on 9/30/24, 10:20 AM

  I'm told that GPU-based encoding (Nvenc etc) can't possibly match a "brute force' CPU encode if you want truly tiny filesizes. Nvenc's encoder is also miserable in terms of quality

  Does this "Vulkan based encoding" mean we'll be able to get the best of both worlds? A 'pure' software encoder, but with the massive parallelism of a GPU?

  If so I'd be extremely excited. Getting to shrink my DVD and Blu Ray rip collection down by moving it all to AV1 at rest would massively reduce my storage cost

• by ksec on 9/30/24, 11:06 AM

  This is a great VVC release! Unfortunately x266 is still far from ready.

  I am surprised we got LC-EVC in. Not sure about adoption outside TV but it is a very nice technology that is hyper efficient. ( This is not related to the MPEG 5 EVC )

  >you can use LC-EVC with H.264, HEVC or AV1 base layers.

  It can be used with VVC as well. That is what the Brazilian TV 3.0 has adopted. On the surface this gives an additional 10-20% BD-Rate. Can't wait t have encoder to test this out.

• by xenodium on 9/30/24, 11:30 AM

  While ffmpeg is a powerhouse, I don't use it frequently enough to remember all the options I'd need for my typical usage. Having said that, I have saved some magical incantations over time and built a handy context menu over time https://lmno.lol/alvaro/how-i-batch-apply-and-save-one-liner...

  Now I can just highlight a file and:

  - covert audio to mp3

  - convert gif to video

  - convert to mp4

  - convert video to gif

  - convert video to webp

  - convert video to hevc mkv

  - convert video to mp3

  - convert video to mp3 with artwork

  - convert video to thumbnail

  - trim video beginning

  - trim video end

  - drop video audio

  - speed up video

  - speed up video fragment

  - resize video

• by lyu07282 on 9/30/24, 10:25 AM

  > This release is more than 2700 commits, and the diff is around 211kLoC!

  That's impressive, glad to see such an incredibly important project healthy!

• by yellowsir on 9/30/24, 3:18 PM

  I wonder where they host

  >>> Bandwidth Restricted

  The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly. Details:

  451 Actioning this file would cause "jbkempf.com//blog/2024/ffmpeg-7.1.0/" to exceed the per-day file actions limit of 160000 actions, try again later >>>

• by kuschku on 9/30/24, 10:43 AM

  Is anyone working on adding/improving support for RAW formats? As in, cinema DNG (in .MXF or as image sequence), blackmagic RAW, Apple ProRes Raw?

  I only found an open ffmpeg patchset for cinema DNG, blackmagic raw has no support anywhere outside of the manufacturer's SDK and Apple ProRes RAW has only Apple's SDK and a proprietary reimplementation by a czech developer. The current ffmpeg release supports afaict neither of these formats.

  I thought about writing my own decoder for ProRes RAW but as I've never written a codec before, I haven't had much success ^^

• by orev on 9/30/24, 3:23 PM

  Main site has hit a bandwidth limit

  https://archive.ph/6xEjD

• by captn3m0 on 9/30/24, 10:21 AM

  It would be nice if FFmpeg could also specify a clear support policy for the LTS release. As of now, LTS releases are marked, but what does Long Term Support really mean is (afaik) left unspecified. Having a clear policy like (2 LTS are supported at a given time, and every ODD.1 release is LTS) would be helpful.

• by gcr on 9/30/24, 11:53 AM

  Does anyone have details on VVC’s auxiliary stream support (transparency / depth)? I work on large-scale outdoor scene understanding datasets and being able to encode stereo RGB video with 16-bit depth would be extremely helpful!

• by boristsr on 9/30/24, 10:14 AM

  Impressive release!