● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportMedium impact1 neutral
FFmpeg 9.0 "Lei" Released with Rewritten swscale, Vulkan Support, and ABI Breaks
Key points
- FFmpeg 9.0 "Lei" is a major release.
- The swscale library has been rewritten for improved architecture.
- New Vulkan SPIR-V backend enables GPU processing for swscale.
- All seven core libraries have major version bumps, causing an ABI break.
FFmpeg 9.0 "Lei" Released
FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei", has been released, approximately four and a half months after version 8.1 "Hoare". This major update incorporates over 2200 commits from more than 160 authors, affecting 1781 files and adding nearly 85000 lines of code while deleting over 33000.
Major Library Version Bumps and ABI Break
The release includes major version bumps for all seven of FFmpeg's core libraries: libavutil 61, libavcodec 63, libavformat 63, libavdevice 63, libavfilter 12, libswscale 10, and libswresample 7. This signifies an ABI (Application Binary Interface) break across the entire suite, enabling a significant internal cleanup that FFmpeg typically reserves for major version increments.
Rewritten swscale Library
A key long-term development in FFmpeg 9.0 is the multi-year rewrite of the swscale library. The new architecture decomposes conversions into elementary operations, which are then optimized and compiled into kernel chains. This replaces the previous twenty-year-old bespoke, format-specific conversion code.
New swscale Features and Vulkan Backend
The rewritten swscale introduces a public API with an SwsBackend selector. Available backends now include a C reference, a fast memcpy path, chained x86 SIMD kernels, chained AArch64 NEON kernels, and a Vulkan SPIR-V backend. The Vulkan backend compiles operation lists into compute shaders, allowing the same conversion graph to run on either the CPU or GPU. Additionally, a new SwsScaler enum provides explicit control over scaling algorithms.
Improved Precision and Correctness
Underlying correctness engineering has been a focus, with conversion mathematics moving to a 64-bit rational type for exact computation instead of floating-point. This change eliminated a series of overflow checks. The SWS_BITEXACT option ensures bit-exact results, even with the Vulkan backend, by decorating linear arithmetic with SPIR-V NoContraction to prevent GPU-side multiply-add fusion.
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Reporting from
FFmpeg 9.0 "Lei" has been released, featuring a complete rewrite of the swscale library, new Vulkan SPIR-V backend, and an ABI break across all seven core libraries. This major update improves multimedia processing capabilities and allows for more flexible and optimized video scaling operations on both CPUs and GPUs.