The 2026 major release of the open-source media engine, published August 3, adds direct animated WebP support, more Vulkan, CUDA, and AMD AMF processing, wider HDR handling, and drops some legacy code.
2026-08-04 · by Moe Ameen
The FFmpeg project released FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," on August 3, 2026 — its major release for the year, arriving about four months after FFmpeg 8.1. FFmpeg is the free, open-source command-line engine that decodes, encodes, transcodes, cuts, filters, and muxes almost every media format in use, and it runs the video pipeline inside a large share of the tools creators already touch, usually invisibly.
The most-noted new feature is native support for animated WebP: a new decoder and demuxer let FFmpeg read animated WebP files directly for the first time. Much of the rest of the release is about faster processing on graphics hardware. FFmpeg 9.0 extends GPU work 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 support including an HDR-capable color converter, a frame-rate-converter filter, and hardware memory mapping. Apple hardware gains VideoToolbox-accelerated ProRes RAW decoding.
On formats and metadata, 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 older code, including standalone CELT decoding and deprecated NVENC options for pre-11.1 versions of NVIDIA's SDK. The short RELEASE_NOTES point to the full Changelog for the complete list.
The honest read for a creator: FFmpeg 9.0 changes nothing about your posting cadence, because the bottleneck for most people was never the encode — it was producing enough on-brand content and getting it out consistently. A faster engine renders your video a little quicker; it does not decide what to post, write it in your voice, or publish it. That is the gap Kompozy fills, and it is why you can treat a release like this as good news you never have to act on.
Kompozy already runs ffmpeg on its render workers, so you inherit engine improvements automatically as its builds advance — no install, no changelog to read. But the reason to open Kompozy the day this ships has nothing to do with WebP or Vulkan. It is that Kompozy generates net-new content the engine can't: a HeyGen persona short, a brand-exact carousel, a blog post, an email newsletter — all governed by your Persona Brief so the voice stays yours. Then it reframes each output to 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9, writes captions per platform, routes everything through a per-post review pipeline, and schedules the set across eight social platforms plus blog and email. FFmpeg 9.0 is a sharper tool in the toolbox; Kompozy is the assembly line that turns one idea into a week of published posts.
FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," was released on August 3, 2026, roughly four months after FFmpeg 8.1. It is the project's major release for 2026.
Native animated WebP decoding — a new decoder and demuxer let FFmpeg read animated WebP files directly. The release also adds more GPU acceleration across Vulkan, NVIDIA CUDA, and AMD AMF, wider HDR metadata support, LCEVC muxing in MP4, and an ONNX Runtime DNN backend, while removing some legacy code like standalone CELT decoding.
Usually not. Most people use ffmpeg indirectly through other apps. As those apps update to a current build they inherit the improvements. Kompozy runs ffmpeg server-side, so the video it renders and publishes uses the engine for you.