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 Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats, AV1 and VP9 extension work, 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 support for compile-time SPIR-V generation, support for pre-compiled shaders, Vulkan shader compression support, 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 git.ffmpeg.org. Here’s to hoping for more exciting Vulkan Video improvements and adoption in 2026.
