Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Multimedia Powerhouse FFmpeg Hits 3.0

Posted by timothy on from the foundational-support dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The milestone release FFmpeg 3.0 "Einstein" has been unleashed. For those who need a reminder, FFmpeg comprises several libraries and command-line tools (the main command-line tool being "ffmpeg") that encode, decode, transcode, and stream audio/visual data, etc. FFmpeg supports a multitude of codecs, filters, and container formats too numerous to mention here. FFmpeg is used by MPlayer, VLC, HandBrake, Chrome, and many other projects. Changes from 2.x to 3.0 include: a much better native AAC encoder, better hardware acceleration, and some API/ABI breakage. See this, this, this, this, and the changelog for much better descriptions of the improvements.

27 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Not on Mint by HalAtWork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not in the default repos on Mint, I learned this was replaced by libav. I used it to crop some videos for use in OpenShot* by commandline and the parameters seem compatible with FFmpeg. Any reason for the fork? I'm currently reading this to suss it out, hopefully it's good in the long run, and at least I can do what I need to do in the meantime.

    *(love it for editing home videos but lacking soundtrack support, added that by commandline too w/libav)

    --
    Twinstiq, game news
    1. Re:Not on Mint by invictusvoyd · · Score: 4, Funny

      Define risk : Unpatched FFmpeg on a compromised mint ISO

    2. Re: Not on Mint by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Debian was a big player in the libAV mess, and they recently switched back to ffmpeg, so I imagine mint will at some point too.

    3. Re:Not on Mint by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      Yeah, having choices is a horrible thing. I want others to decide everything for me!

    4. Re: Not on Mint by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Informative

      I remember that crap. It was fucked the way they changed it so it seemed like it was ffmpeg was installed but it wasn't. It broke so many applications and I couldn't figure out why. It used to work and then it didn't. When I figured it out I was more than annoyed. Sure if you want to change to libav go ahead but don't call it ffmpeg. I then got to compile ffmpeg from scratch. They didn't have any nifty cut and paste instructions at the time.

    5. Re: Not on Mint by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 3, Informative

      The narrative keeps changing. The first pass I heard was ffmpeg was full of NIH, haphazard bullshit, retard babies, and idiot politics, with code quality going down the shitter, hence the fork to libav; the latest pass I heard was ffmpeg folds in all the important features and bugfixes libav makes, while libav goes all NIH and re-implements their own from scratch, often simply ignoring bugs because it's run by a development team of retard babies and driven entirely by idiot politics.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
  2. Cool, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder how much sooner we would have gotten this release if not for all of the HEVC patent/licensing fee shenanigans of late?

  3. Stability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My initial reaction:

    Multimedia Powerhouse FFmpeg Hits 3.0

    That's nice, but does it have a stable ABI yet?

    and some API/ABI breakage

    Welp.

    1. Re:Stability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My initial reaction:

      Multimedia Powerhouse FFmpeg Hits 3.0

      That's nice, but does it have a stable ABI yet?

      and some API/ABI breakage

      Welp.

      It is a major release. Some breakage is expected. As long as you stay on the same major it should be stable.

    2. Re:Stability by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It is a major release. Some breakage is expected. As long as you stay on the same major it should be stable.

      Hah. Good luck with that. FFmpeg is an amazing collection of codecs wrapped in a horrible and ever-changing API. I have used it on a number of projects and it seems every time I upgrade something breaks.

    3. Re:Stability by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      As long as you stay on the same major it should be stable.

      Spoken like someone who's never had to maintain video related code which interfaces with FFMPEG!

      It has been pretty good for the last few years but before that it was the single largest cause of rewrites.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  4. easy copy/paste compile with static libraries by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want the newest ffmpeg and on any Linux, you can easily do what I did last night. The ffmpeg page has copy/paste instructions for downloading and compiling the newest ffmpeg with the newest versions of the libraries/ codecs it uses. Those instructions set PREFIX to something other than /usr or /usr/local so it doesn't step on anything installed on the system. It was really simple. I was using a very old version of Fedora, but didn't have any problems of missing dependencies because the dependencies are included in the instructions.

    One of the libraries takes a long time to compile, so I let that run while I and did other things. If you copy/paste exactly, you end up with the new ffmpeg in $HOME/bin/ . You can of course change that, or move it after it has compiled.

  5. fast encoding? by ooloorie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How fast can ffmpeg do encoding on modern hardware? Is there functional GPU support to get high compression rates in real time?

    1. Re:fast encoding? by dwywit · · Score: 2

      Well, it works faster in a Debian VM under Windows 7, than it does in Windows 7. Mind you, I'm not usually looking for high compression - it's mostly the other way 'round, extracting poorly-encoded, over-compressed MKV files back to usable MP4.

      It's comparable with Premiere Pro/Media Encoder when encoding.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    2. Re:fast encoding? by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

      Even CPU bound, ffmpeg does several hundred frames per second when encoding, as do all the front-ends that use it.

      Bullshit. Depends totally on the codec and settings. Just try encoding, say, 1080p H.265 with veryslow - preset and tell me about all those hundreds of FPS you're getting.

    3. Re:fast encoding? by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

      I am getting about ~180 FPS when using NVENC to encode 1080p H.265 on a Geforce GTX 970. YMMV.

    4. Re:fast encoding? by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Funny

      Under Gentoo it's more like 7.35-7.7.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  6. Have an nvidia or Intel GPU? by raymorris · · Score: 4, Informative

    You could try it out
    https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/H...

    1. Re:Have an nvidia or Intel GPU? by Malc · · Score: 2

      I wish Apple would allow/expose Intel QuickSync on OS X. Can't even access this BootCamp running Windows on Apple hardware.

    2. Re:Have an nvidia or Intel GPU? by I4ko · · Score: 2

      It is not apple but the chipset that does not allow you to see the integrated GPU when another GPU is installed. Same for alienware alpha for example.

    3. Re:Have an nvidia or Intel GPU? by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

      The instructions for using NVENC are wrong, though. NVENC does not support specifying constant rate-factor with -crf, it only does CBR or VBR, and VBR can be done either by specifying bitrates or quantizers. NVENC does work fine, they just need to fix that information to actually show how to use it correctly.

    4. Re:Have an nvidia or Intel GPU? by Shinobi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      On a lot of motherboards you can get around it by enabling both PCI-E and iGPU in BIOS or EFI/UEFI, and then in your OS you add another, virtual, display that is linked to the Intel GPU. Even works with some of the cheaper Sandy Bridge era mobos(and pretty much all the expensive ones from the time) running Windows 7.

  7. Re:V.L.C. is the One for Me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Unfortunately, the current release of vlc refuses to build against ffmpeg-3.0. Transcode and xine-libs are also broken by the changes, but those might be fixable. One day, many of us will be using ffmpeg-3.0 in our systems : but it might be a few weeks away.

  8. Re:"For those who need a reminder..." by timothy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're not right :)

    I added a link to the news at the ffmpeg.org site re: the actual release, might have fixed some punctuation or some other trivial stuff, but the submission that became this post came in pretty much as-is.

    Apologies for not noting this release a few days sooner, too; the things that FFmpeg make possible are deeply appreciated by naive end-users like me.

    timothy

    --
    jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
  9. list of known FFmpeg license violators by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Like stealing from a Girl Scout

    https://trac.ffmpeg.org/query?...

  10. Re:V.L.C. is the One for Me by SlashdotOgre · · Score: 2

    Correct, the latest stable release (VLC 2.2. 2) doesn't compile due to API changes on the FFMPEG side however the latest VLC in their Git repository works with it. I am the Gentoo proxy-maintainer for VLC, and I have looked at the changes to make VLC 2.2.x work with FFMPEG 3.0, and they're not trivial or backwards compatible. My recommendation for folks on Gentoo at least is to use VLC-9999 (the Gentoo name of the latest upstream commit) if you need FFMPEG 3.0. One other thing to note is that FFMPEG >= 2.9 also breaks hardware acceleration in VLC (i.e. vdpau or vaapi), and if you need those, either stay on FFMPEG 2.8.6 or switch to libav.

    --
    Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
  11. Links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Compiling FFmpeg on Ubuntu / Debian / Mint

    Compiling FFmpeg on CentOS / RHEL / Fedora

    Other platforms.