February 28th, 2023, FFmpeg 6.0 "Von Neumann"

A new major release, FFmpeg 6.0 "Von Neumann", is now available for download. This release has many new encoders and decoders, filters, ffmpeg CLI tool improvements, and also, changes the way releases are done. All major releases will now bump the version of the ABI. We plan to have a new major release each year. Another release-specific change is that deprecated APIs will be removed after 3 releases, upon the next major bump. This means that releases will be done more often and will be more organized.

New decoders featured are Bonk, RKA, Radiance, SC-4, APAC, VQC, WavArc and a few ADPCM formats. QSV and NVenc now support AV1 encoding. The FFmpeg CLI (we usually refer to it as ffmpeg.c to avoid confusion) has speed-up improvements due to threading, as well as statistics options, and the ability to pass option values for filters from a file. There are quite a few new audio and video filters, such as adrc, showcwt, backgroundkey and ssim360, with a few hardware ones too. Finally, the release features many behind-the-scenes changes, including a new FFT and MDCT implementation used in codecs (expect a blog post about this soon), numerous bugfixes, better ICC profile handling and colorspace signalling improvement, introduction of a number of RISC-V vector and scalar assembly optimized routines, and a few new improved APIs, which can be viewed in the doc/APIchanges file in our tree. A few submitted features, such as the Vulkan improvements and more FFT optimizations will be in the next minor release, 6.1, which we plan to release soon, in line with our new release schedule. Some highlights are:

• Radiance HDR image support
• ddagrab (Desktop Duplication) video capture filter
• ffmpeg -shortest_buf_duration option
• ffmpeg now requires threading to be built
• ffmpeg now runs every muxer in a separate thread
• Add new mode to cropdetect filter to detect crop-area based on motion vectors and edges
• VAAPI decoding and encoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9
• WBMP (Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap) image format
• a3dscope filter
• bonk decoder and demuxer
• Micronas SC-4 audio decoder
• LAF demuxer
• APAC decoder and demuxer
• Media 100i decoders
• DTS to PTS reorder bsf
• ViewQuest VQC decoder
• backgroundkey filter
• nvenc AV1 encoding support
• MediaCodec decoder via NDKMediaCodec
• MediaCodec encoder
• oneVPL support for QSV
• QSV AV1 encoder
• QSV decoding and encoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9
• showcwt multimedia filter
• corr video filter
• adrc audio filter
• afdelaysrc audio filter
• WADY DPCM decoder and demuxer
• CBD2 DPCM decoder
• ssim360 video filter
• ffmpeg CLI new options: -stats_enc_pre[_fmt], -stats_enc_post[_fmt], -stats_mux_pre[_fmt]
• hstack_vaapi, vstack_vaapi and xstack_vaapi filters
• XMD ADPCM decoder and demuxer
• media100 to mjpegb bsf
• ffmpeg CLI new option: -fix_sub_duration_heartbeat
• WavArc decoder and demuxer
• CrystalHD decoders deprecated
• SDNS demuxer
• RKA decoder and demuxer
• filtergraph syntax in ffmpeg CLI now supports passing file contents as option values
• hstack_qsv, vstack_qsv and xstack_qsv filters

We strongly recommend users, distributors, and system integrators to upgrade unless they use current git master.   

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so .... should we try this or wait for 6.1 "shortly after"?