FFmpeg Squaring Away Vulkan Support For Its Next Release

2020 could be the year we see the Vulkan API seeing more adoption on the desktop outside of games. We are already looking forward to LibreOffice 7.0 with Vulkan rendering support coming out later this summer while the next FFmpeg release also has Vulkan support lined up.

For the past several months we've been seeing various Vulkan efforts around FFmpeg for this widely-used multimedia library. More Vulkan code was merged yesterday and goes along with a number of recent filters being added that are accelerated by the Vulkan API.

The new filters ready for their debut in the next version of FFmpeg include avgblur_vulkan, overlay_vulkan, scale_vulkan, and chromaber_vulkan. There are also new options for FFmpeg to select the Vulkan device adapter to use on the system and other infrastructure work around supporting Vulkan and DMA-BUF handling that is present in FFmpeg Git.

So the next FFmpeg release whether it is called FFmpeg 4.3 or renamed to FFmpeg 5.0 has the initial Vulkan support in place. While Vulkan support in FFmpeg alone is big, also in this release is the ZeroMQ support, Intel QSV accelerated VP9/MJPEG decode, TrueHD in MP4 support, AMD AF encoding on Linux, many new filters, AV1 encoding via Rav1e, and several new demuxers.

Those wanting to test out the current FFmpeg development code with the Vulkan support and other additions can find it via GitHub.