FFmpeg is my all time favorite CLI tool. The obscene amount time I have spent using FFmpeg over the years is just ridiculous, this is one of the few tools out there that I can’t live without. It goes without saying I deal with a lot of video editing. So naturally, I am very excited about this new major version release. You can see a quick list of major changes on their changelog. Some of the more exciting changes related to hardware acceleration that popped out to me:
Most these involves hardware accelaration involving Intel QuickSync, OpenCL, VAAPI MJPEG, AMD AMF, VideoToolbox HEVC. Even though I have not gotten around running benchmarks, the few encoding tests I have done using Intel QuickSync and NVIDIA NVDEC, the speed bump is noticably much higher without any doubt. Chances are high your linux distro don’t have FFmpeg 4.0 available yet, but you always download binaries for you OS of choice from here: http://ffmpeg.org/download.html
~/Desktop: ffmpeg -i ffmpeg version 4.0 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers built with Apple LLVM version 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1) configuration: --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/4.0 --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --enable-version3 --enable-hardcoded-tables --enable-avresample --cc=clang --host-cflags= --host-ldflags= --enable-gpl --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-opencl --enable-videotoolbox --disable-lzma libavutil 56. 14.100 / 56. 14.100 libavcodec 58. 18.100 / 58. 18.100 libavformat 58. 12.100 / 58. 12.100 libavdevice 58. 3.100 / 58. 3.100 libavfilter 7. 16.100 / 7. 16.100 libavresample 4. 0. 0 / 4. 0. 0 libswscale 5. 1.100 / 5. 1.100 libswresample 3. 1.100 / 3. 1.100 libpostproc 55. 1.100 / 55. 1.100