FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan-related imporvements to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Over the past year FFmpeg saw [1]Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats , [2]AV1 and VP9 extension work , [3]performance improvements , and other work around Vulkan Video. It will be very exciting to see how FFmpeg delivers in 2026 with Vulkan Video and how the software ecosystem as a whole begins taking up this cross-platform, open industry standard for video encode/decode.

Yesterday Lynne merged a number of Vulkan improvements and the SPIR-V intermediate representation to get things going for FFmpeg in 2026. Among the work was [4]support for compile-time SPIR-V generation , [5]support for pre-compiled shaders , [6]Vulkan shader compression support , [7]long vector extension , and adapting code like the Vulkan Apple ProRes acceleration and Vulkan-based video scaling to leverage the SPIR-V generation at compile-time.

Those interested in all the latest activity to the FFmpeg codebase can find it via the Git repository at [8]git.ffmpeg.org . Here's to hoping for more exciting Vulkan Video improvements and adoption in 2026.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Apple-ProRes-Decode

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Vulkan-AV1-Encoding

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Faster-FFV1-Vulkan-Enc

[4] https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/f2affdfafb4e7dd0674ba415ea77faa949a11439

[5] https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/540c4df5c7b85852b18b591353c0a475ae3e358e

[6] https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/e844b43776fa73e9e36624b770889e93fa667297

[7] https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/e32cb94258f30e13b3e52c24bc4b04dbd0fc0009

[8] https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/shortlog