FFmpeg is known for carrying a lot of hand-optimized Assembly code for speeding up this widely-used multimedia library and [1]taking advantage of AVX-512 and other modern CPU ISA capabilities. Merged yesterday was support for making use of AES-NI for those relying on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) within FFmpeg for encrypted video streams.

[2]AES-NI has been found on Intel and AMD processors for well more than a decade now... In fact, the better part of two decades. Surprisingly it's taken until 2025 for FFmpeg's libavutil code to add an AES-NI optimized code path within its AES routines.

In any event the performance results from this AES-NI optimized code are quite exciting for AMD/Intel systems if you are dealing with encrypted AES video buffers within FFmpeg. [3]The commit landing the AES-NI optimized code cites a huge speed-up:

With this now-merged code, dropping from 17 seconds with the pure C version down to 0.59 seconds with the new AES-NI path within libavutil. This AES-NI libavutil path is also comparable to gcrypt and other AES crypto implementations too.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-AVX-512-uyvytoyuv422

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/AES-NI

[3] https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/2ea3c51795414f092ae44de86ae5e3ac8ebd8b15