It's coming soon to a GNU/Linux distribution near you

Aug 6, 2019 18:50 GMT  ·  By

The FFmpeg project released a new major version of their open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework used by numerous games and applications, FFmpeg 4.2.

Dubbed "Ada," the FFMpeg 4.2 series introduces some exciting new features and improvements, among which we can mention support for decoding AV1 files via the libdav1d library, support for ARIB STD-B24 caption (profiles A and C) based on the libaribb24 library, and support for decoding HEVC 4:4:4 content in nvdec and cuviddec.

FFmpeg 4.2 also comes with support for decoding HEVC 4:4:4 content in VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix), support for using Clang to compile CUDA kernels, the ability for the mov muxer to write tracks with unspecified language instead of English by default, a GIF parser, as well as the removal of the libndi-newtek component.

New filters, encoders, decoders, and demuxers

Of course, there's no major FFmpeg release without some new filters, and it looks like FFmpeg 4.2 brings quite a bunch of them, including an AV1 frame split bitstream filter, tpad filter, dedot filter, freezedetect filter, truehd_core bitstream filter, anlmdn filter, maskfun filter, as well as chromashift and rgbashift filters.

The lagfun filter, asoftclip filter, colorhold filter, xmedian filter, asr filter, derain filter, deesser filter, and showspatial multimedia filter were added as well, along with the dhav demuxer, vividas demuxer, KUX demuxer, IFV demuxer, hcom demuxer and decoder, hymt decoder, ARBC decoder, agm decoder, lscr decoder, VP4 video decoder, and the PCM-DVD encoder.

Under the hood, the FFmpeg 4.2 release consists of the libavutil 56.31.100, libavcodec 58.54.100, libavformat 58.29.100, libavdevice 58.8.100, libavfilter 7.57.100, libswscale 5.5.100, libswresample 3.5.100, and libpostproc 55.5.100 libraries. You can download the FFmpeg 4.2 sources right now from our free software portal, but we recommend installing it from the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.