FFmpeg 5.0 Aims To Be An LTS Release

FFmpeg 5.0 has now been formally christened as for what is aiming to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source multimedia library.

FFmpeg 5.0 was tagged this weekend while out today is the formal announcement for this updated multimedia library that is widely depended upon throughout the industry.

FFmpeg.org notes of the v5.0 milestone, "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."

VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf blogged more about today's FFmpeg 5.0 milestone. He noted in the post that FFmpeg 5.0 will hopefully be the start of time-based releases. The hope is for FFmpeg to see new major releases on a yearly basis while for Long Term Support releases to happen every other year. With that the hope is FFmpeg 5.0 will mature into being the project's first long-term support release. Kempf ended his post with, "We'll see how realistic this is [for FFmpeg LTS]. Enjoy this release!"