FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," was released on August 4, 2026, arriving roughly four months after the 8.1 "Hoare" minor release. The 9.0 release branch was cut from the project's main development branch on June 26, 2026. Full release notes are available at the FFmpeg project repository on GitHub (release notes).

FFmpeg 9.0 continues the project's sustained investment in Vulkan-based video processing. Vulkan is a low-level API that lets software talk directly to GPU hardware, and FFmpeg has been using it to handle video encoding and decoding on the GPU rather than relying solely on the CPU. The 9.0 release adds Vulkan-based decoding for APV (Advanced Professional Video) and Apple ProRes RAW support through the Vulkan API, extending a trajectory that began in the 8.x series.

The earlier 8.x releases laid the groundwork. FFmpeg 8.0 "Huffman," released August 22, 2025, introduced Vulkan compute-based codecs for FFv1 (encode and decode) and ProRes RAW decode, along with hardware-accelerated Vulkan VP9 decoding and Vulkan AV1 encoding. FFmpeg 8.1 "Hoare," announced March 16, 2026, followed up with Vulkan compute-based ProRes encoding and decoding and DPX decoding.

Beyond Vulkan, the 9.0 changelog records two specific additions. The AMF Color Converter filter (vf_vpp_amf) gained extended HDR capabilities, broadening AMD's Advanced Media Framework integration for HDR pipeline workflows. LCEVC (Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding) track muxing support has been added to the MP4 muxer, enabling container-level handling of the MPEG-5 Part 2 enhancement-layer codec — a standard designed to add a lightweight enhancement layer on top of existing video codecs to improve quality at low bitrates.

The 9.0 release arrives on hardware that the project did not have access to a year ago. On June 24, 2026, Ampere Computing donated an AmpereOne (Mt. Mitchell) 2U server to FFmpeg, equipped with 192 Arm cores, 512 GB of RAM, 24 NVMe bays, and 2x25G networking. The server joined the project's infrastructure two days before the 9.0 release branch was cut, positioning it as a continuous integration and testing platform for Arm-native build paths and codec validation.

The 8.x releases that preceded "Lei" established a substantial decoder and encoder foundation that 9.0 now builds upon. FFmpeg 8.0 added native decoders for APV (Advanced Professional Video), ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, and G.728, along with formats MCC, G.728, Whip, and APV, and filters including colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, and Whisper. FFmpeg 8.1 added experimental xHE-AAC Mps212 MPEG-H decoding via libmpeghdec, D3D12 H.264/AV1 encoding, Rockchip H.264/HEVC hardware encoding, and the hxvs demuxer.

Looking at the cadence, FFmpeg's major-version releases have compressed to roughly four months between 8.1 and 9.0. The 8.0-to-8.1 gap was about seven months. Whether this signals a permanently faster release rhythm or a one-off is not yet determinable from two data points, but the project clearly has momentum. The Vulkan acceleration push is the throughline: each release since 8.0 has added compute-based codec paths through the Vulkan API, moving FFmpeg toward a model where GPU compute handles both encoding and decoding across an increasingly wide set of codecs.

The AmpereOne donation is worth noting separately. FFmpeg's value to the industry, from streaming platforms to embedded devices, has long outpaced its infrastructure budget. A 192-core Arm server with substantial NVMe storage and networking capacity gives the project meaningful headroom for continuous integration — the automated build-and-test process that checks every code change — and for codec conformance tests that commodity hardware struggles with. That this arrived from Ampere, whose cores target exactly the server-class workloads FFmpeg's downstream users care about, is a practical alignment of interests.

The broader context here is that FFmpeg remains the connective tissue of the video processing stack — the layer that ties together encoding, decoding, and format conversion across countless applications. The codecs landing in each release, APV, LCEVC, MPEG-H, reflect ongoing standardization work that the project absorbs quickly. The Vulkan acceleration path matters because it offers a vendor-neutral GPU compute route, distinct from the codec-specific hardware blocks exposed through VAAPI (Video Acceleration API, used on Linux), D3D12 (DirectX 12, used on Windows), AMF (AMD's Advanced Media Framework), and Rockchip interfaces that the 8.x releases also expanded. Having both approaches mature in parallel gives downstream integrators flexibility in how they offload video workloads from the CPU to dedicated hardware.

The full changelog for version 9.0 is hosted at the project's GitHub repository (Changelog).