The August 2026 major release of the open-source media engine, "Lei" — native animated WebP decoding, more GPU-accelerated processing, and wider HDR handling.
Last verified · 2026-08-04 · by Moe Ameen
FFmpeg is the free, open-source command-line engine that most of the internet's video and audio passes through — it decodes, encodes, transcodes, cuts, filters, and muxes nearly every media format that exists, and it powers the video pipeline inside a huge share of commercial tools. FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," is its major release for 2026, published on August 3, 2026, about four months after FFmpeg 8.1.
The headline addition is native support for animated WebP: a new decoder and demuxer let FFmpeg read animated WebP files directly for the first time, so looping WebP clips and stickers become first-class inputs instead of something you convert around. Much of the rest of the release is about doing the same work faster on graphics hardware. FFmpeg 9.0 extends GPU-accelerated processing across vendors — APV decoding on Vulkan, a `v360_vulkan` filter for 360-degree video, a `transpose_cuda` filter for NVIDIA cards, and expanded AMD AMF work including an HDR-capable color converter, a frame-rate-converter filter, and hardware memory mapping. Apple hardware gains VideoToolbox-accelerated ProRes RAW decoding.
On the format and metadata side, 9.0 adds LCEVC track muxing into MP4, SMPTE 2094-50 HDR metadata support and passthrough, HE-AAC 960 decoding for DAB+ radio, a bitstream filter that splits multi-layer Dolby Vision HEVC, and an ONNX Runtime backend for its DNN-based filters with GPU execution. There is even a video encoder for the Panic Playdate handheld. The release also removes some old code, including standalone CELT decoding and deprecated NVENC options for pre-11.1 versions of NVIDIA's SDK. For the exact, complete changelog, check ffmpeg.org.
FFmpeg is infrastructure, not a content app. Version 9.0 makes the engine faster and broader, but it still has no interface for making posts, no AI that writes a script or captions in your voice, no avatar video, and no scheduler. It processes files you already have; producing and publishing the content is a different layer.
You will almost certainly never install FFmpeg 9.0 yourself, and that is exactly the point. Kompozy runs ffmpeg on its own render workers, so the engine's improvements reach your content the moment the platform's builds move to 9.0 — you inherit them without touching a terminal or reading a changelog. Concretely, ffmpeg is what burns captions into Persona Shorts, composites the avatar layer and graphics keyframes in Persona Frames, assembles Marketing Shorts and Listicle Video, cuts long recordings into Clipped Shorts, and encodes the final MP4 for every one of Kompozy's video formats. When that engine gets faster GPU paths and wider format support, those renders get quicker and cover more source material — which matters most when autopilot is fanning a week of content out at once and every second of render time is multiplied across formats and platforms.
The 9.0 features map to real jobs. Native animated WebP decoding means a looping WebP asset can drop into a composite instead of failing an import. Wider HDR metadata handling helps footage shot on modern phones keep its color through the pipeline instead of getting flattened. But the engine still stops at "the file is processed correctly." Kompozy is the layer on top: it generates the net-new video in the first place, writes on-brand copy through the Persona Brief, reframes to 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9 per destination, and schedules the finished post across eight social platforms plus blog and email. FFmpeg 9.0 is a better set of hands; Kompozy is the studio those hands work in.
FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," was released on August 3, 2026, about four months after FFmpeg 8.1. It is the project's major release for 2026. The RELEASE_NOTES point to the full Changelog for the complete list of changes.
The standout is native animated WebP decoding via a new decoder and demuxer. The rest centers on faster GPU processing — APV on Vulkan, a v360_vulkan filter, a transpose_cuda filter for NVIDIA, and expanded AMD AMF work — plus wider HDR support (SMPTE 2094-50 metadata, multi-layer Dolby Vision), LCEVC muxing in MP4, ProRes RAW on Apple VideoToolbox, and an ONNX Runtime DNN backend.
No. Any app that renders video with a current FFmpeg build inherits its improvements. Kompozy runs ffmpeg server-side, so the video it generates and publishes uses the engine on your behalf — you never touch a flag or manage a build.
No. FFmpeg is a processing engine, not a generator — it does not write scripts, create avatars, or invent footage. Version 9.0 adds an ONNX Runtime backend so some DNN-based filters (like upscaling) run on the GPU, but it still processes files you already have. To generate net-new video, pair it with a tool built for that.
No. FFmpeg only encodes and processes files — it has no captioning in your voice, scheduling, or publishing. To generate, caption, schedule, and publish across platforms, pair it with a content engine like Kompozy, which runs ffmpeg under the hood anyway.