FFmpeg 9.0 "Lei" Lands With GPU AI Filters, Animated WebP, and a Playdate Encoder
The ONNX GPU backend turns FFmpeg's AI filters from a curiosity into a production tool for restoration and upscaling pipelines. Animated WebP support removes a long-standing friction point for anyone building image-heavy web services or content systems.
The 9.0 release, codenamed "Lei," arrives four months after 8.1 and pushes computation further onto GPUs. A new v360_vulkan filter accelerates 360-degree video transforms, transpose_cuda handles rotation on Nvidia cards, and AMD gains HDR tone mapping, hardware frame-rate conversion, and memory-mapped transfers. On macOS, ProRes RAW decoding moves to VideoToolbox for faster, lower-power transcodes.
Format gaps close across the board. Animated WebP decoding and muxing are now built in, eliminating external tools for GIF-replacement workflows. HE-AAC 960 decoding opens direct ingest of DAB+ broadcast audio. HDR pipelines get SMPTE 2094-50 dynamic metadata passthrough, a Dolby Vision layer splitter, and LCEVC track writing in MP4, completing an encode-decode loop that began in the previous release.
AI video filters cross the threshold from demo to daily use. The ONNX Runtime DNN backend can now execute on a GPU, making super-resolution, denoising, and old-video restoration fast enough for batch work. A niche addition rounds out the release: a dedicated encoder for the Playdate handheld console. Two removals—CELT decoding and pre-11.1 NVENC SDK options—trim legacy maintenance overhead.
GPU offload is now the organizing principle of FFmpeg releases, with Vulkan as the preferred cross-platform path and vendor-specific filters filling the gaps.
Animated WebP support arriving in 2026 shows how slowly foundational format gaps close in ubiquitous infrastructure—WebP animation has been a production format for years.
The ONNX GPU backend is the sleeper feature: AI video enhancement inside FFmpeg shifts from a tech demo to something you can actually run at scale without a separate Python stack.
Adding a Playdate encoder signals that FFmpeg's maintainers treat niche hardware as a first-class target, not an afterthought, which keeps the project relevant across the full spectrum of video-producing devices.