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QuoteFFmpeg 7.1 "Péter", a new major release, is now available! A full list of changes can be found in the release changelog.

The more important highlights of the release are that the VVC decoder, merged as experimental in version 7.0, has had enough time to mature and be optimized enough to be declared as stable. The codec is starting to gain traction with broadcast standardization bodies.

Support has been added for a native AAC USAC (part of the xHE-AAC coding system) decoder, with the format starting to be adopted by streaming websites, due to its extensive volume normalization metadata.

MV-HEVC decoding is now supported. This is a stereoscopic coding tool that begun to be shipped and generated by recent phones and VR headsets.

LC-EVC decoding, an enhancement metadata layer to attempt to improve the quality of codecs, is now supported via an external library.

Support for Vulkan encoding, with H264 and HEVC was merged. This finally allows fully Vulkan-based decode-filter-encode pipelines, by having a sink for Vulkan frames, other than downloading or displaying them. The encoders have feature-parity with their VAAPI implementation counterparts. Khronos has announced that support for AV1 encoding is also coming soon to Vulkan, and FFmpeg is aiming to have day-one support.

In addition to the above, this release has had a lot of important internal work done. By far, the standout internally are the improvements made for full-range images. Previously, color range data had two paths, no negotiation, and was unreliably forwarded to filters, encoders, muxers. Work on cleaning the system up started more than 10 years ago, however this stalled due to how fragile the system was, and that breaking behaviour would be unacceptable. The new system fixes this, so now color range is forwarded correctly and consistently everywhere needed, and also laid the path for more advanced forms of negotiation.

Cropping metadata is now supported with Matroska and MP4 formats. This metadata is important not only for archival, but also with AV1, as hardware encoders require its signalling due to the codec not natively supporting one.

version 7.1:
  5 - Raw Captions with Time (RCWT) closed caption demuxer
  6 - LC3/LC3plus decoding/encoding using external library liblc3
  7 - ffmpeg CLI filtergraph chaining
  8 - LC3/LC3plus demuxer and muxer
  9 - pad_vaapi, drawbox_vaapi filters
  10 - vf_scale supports secondary ref input and framesync options
  11 - vf_scale2ref deprecated
  12 - qsv_params option added for QSV encoders
  13 - VVC decoder compatible with DVB test content
  14 - xHE-AAC decoder
  15 - removed DEC Alpha DSP and support code
  16 - VVC encoding support via libvvenc
  17 - perlin video source
  18 - D3D12VA HEVC encoder
  19 - Cropping metadata parsing and writing in Matroska and MP4/MOV de/muxers
  20 - Intel QSV-accelerated VVC decoding
  21 - MediaCodec AAC/AMR-NB/AMR-WB/MP3 decoding
  22 - YUV colorspace negotiation for codecs and filters, obsoleting the
  23  YUVJ pixel format
  24 - Vulkan H.264 encoder
  25 - Vulkan H.265 encoder
  26 - stream specifiers in fftools can now match by stream disposition
  27 - LCEVC enhancement data exporting in H.26x and MP4/ISOBMFF
  28 - LCEVC filter
  29 - MV-HEVC decoding

Links:
- Homepage
- Changelog
- Download ffmpeg-7.1-full_build.7z for win64 @ Geeks3D

7.1.1 was released on 2025-03-03. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 7.1 release branch, which was cut from master on 2024-09-24.

- Download FFmpeg cli tool @ Geeks3D
- All downloads @ ffmpeg.org