FFmpeg 5.0 released [LWN.net]

Version 5.0 of the FFmpeg audio and video toolkit has been released.

For this long-overdue release, a major effort underwent to remove the old encode/decode APIs and replace them with an N:M-based API, the entire libavresample library was removed, libswscale has a new, easier to use AVframe-based API, the Vulkan code was much improved, many new filters were added, including libplacebo integration, and finally, DoVi support was added, including tonemapping and remuxing. The default AAC encoder settings were also changed to improve quality.

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FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 17, 2022 18:33 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (7 responses)

Is the AAC situation any better now, or is it still very much a case of "grab libfdk-aac and ignore the swpat troll's angry yelling"?

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 17, 2022 21:15 UTC (Mon) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (6 responses)

No. The interesting AAC profiles can still have patents. Some AAC profiles are free, but other common ones are not. Maybe around 2024, 20+1 years after publication of the relevant standard for interesting profiles assuming no patent extensions it will change, but even then I will wait until RedHat/IBM layers approve AAC implementation from FFmpeg for inclusion in Fedora.

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 18, 2022 7:02 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (5 responses)

sigh, thought as much. I wish the state of live media in general wasn't so pitiful; it can't be *that* hard to put something more modern (and open) than RTMP+H264/AAC down a pipe but all the available options seem to be either that or Chromium-based walled gardens.

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 18, 2022 14:01 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Well, if a company has no presence in US, then including ffmpeg AAC etc media encoders/decoders is not problematic. Plus time runs fast and even in US if not in 2024, then around 2028-2030 things will be mostly OK. H265 will still require a license, but at least sound will be free. And AAC license is really bad/expensive one. Plus even with H265 there are some noise to allow pure software decoders and just charge hardware manufactures.

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 19, 2022 4:39 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

What about AV1?

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 20, 2022 22:59 UTC (Thu) by MarkVandenBorre (subscriber, #26071) [Link]

Hello Tzafrir!

Live streaming from a live source using anything but h264/aac codec combo is... less trivial to put it mildly. Av1 in particular is quite resource hungry.

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 19, 2022 11:30 UTC (Wed) by dr@jones.dk (subscriber, #7907) [Link] (1 responses)

What is "walled" about Opus and VP8/VP9?

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Jan 20, 2022 4:41 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The part that I actually mentioned. That's why it's called a "walled garden" and not a walled wall.

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Posted Feb 20, 2022 14:55 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

FYI, in a nice example of packages dropping not-that-difficult-to-maintain APIs and causing trouble for their downstreams, in among a lot of other removals of deprecated code ffmpeg 5 dropped AVPicture, which has been deprecated for years, saving maybe a couple of hundred lines of (admittedly nasty) code inside ffmpeg -- but unfortunately even frequently-maintained things like gegl are still using it, let alone maintenance-dead things like (the one I personally was hit with) electricsheep: this is just pretty frippery but no doubt there are other users out there that aren't pretty frippery and all of them are now a bit stuck. I suspect that either such projects will either be dragging around their own copies of ffmpeg 4 for a long time, or a lot of users will simply not be able to upgrade. Given ffmpeg's security exposure, this probably means we have a new source of fun security holes for the future, in the form of countless unmaintained but necessary copies of ffmpeg 4.

I think we can add another rule to the book of how to deprecate and remove things without annoying people: yes, interface X may have been deprecated for ages, but at least hunt around on codesearch.debian.org or something like that before actually dropping it. If there are still lots of users, and most particularly if your project is security-exposed and thus people are basically dragged along to the latest release whether they want it or not, for god's sake don't drop it yet.