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â RELEASE NOTES for FFmpeg 2.6 "Grothendieck" â
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The FFmpeg Project proudly presents FFmpeg 2.6 "Grothendieck", about 3
months after the release of FFmpeg 2.5.
A lot of important work got in this time, so let's start talking about what
we like to brag the most about: features.
A lot of people will probably be happy to hear that we now have support for
NVENC â the Nvidia Video Encoder interface for H.264 encoding â thanks to
Timo Rothenpieler, with some little help from NVIDIA and Philip Langdale.
People in the broadcasting industry might also be interested in the first
steps of closed captions support with the introduction of a decoder by
Anshul Maheswhwari.
Regarding filters love, we improved and added many. We could talk about the
10-bit support in spp, but maybe it's more important to mention the addition
of colorlevels (yet another color handling filter), tblend (allowing you
to for example run a diff between successive frames of a video stream), or
the dcshift audio filter.
There are also two other important filters landing in libavfilter: palettegen
and paletteuse. Both submitted by the Stupeflix company. These filters will
be very useful in case you are looking for creating high quality GIFs, a
format that still bravely fights annihilation in 2015.
There are many other new features, but let's follow-up on one big cleanup
achievement: the libmpcodecs (MPlayer filters) wrapper is finally dead. The
last remaining filters (softpulldown/repeatfields, eq*, and various
postprocessing filters) were ported by Arwa Arif (OPW student) and Paul B
Mahol.
Concerning API changes, there are not many things to mention. Though, the
introduction of device inputs and outputs listing by Lukasz Marek is a
notable addition (try ffmpeg -sources or ffmpeg -sinks for an example of
the usage). As usual, see doc/APIchanges for more information.
Now let's talk about optimizations. Ronald S. Bultje made the VP9 decoder
usable on x86 32-bit systems and pre-ssse3 CPUs like Phenom (even dual core
Athlons can play 1080p 30fps VP9 content now), so we now secretly hope for
Google and Mozilla to use ffvp9 instead of libvpx. But VP9 is not the
center of attention anymore, and HEVC/H.265 is also getting many
improvements, which include C and x86 ASM optimizations, mainly from James
Almer, Christophe Gisquet and Pierre-Edouard Lepere.
Even though we had many x86 contributions, it is not the only architecture
getting some love, with Seppo Tomperi adding ARM NEON optimizations to the
HEVC stack, and James Cowgill adding MIPS64 assembly for all kind of audio
processing code in libavcodec.
And finally, Michael Niedermayer is still fixing many bugs, dealing with
most of the boring work such as making releases, applying tons of
contributors patches, and daily merging the changes from the Libav project.
A more complete Changelog is available at the root of the project, and the
complete Git history on http://source.ffmpeg.org.
We hope you will like this release as much as we enjoyed working on it, and
as usual, if you have any questions about it, or any FFmpeg related topic,
feel free to join us on the #ffmpeg IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) or ask
on the mailing-lists.