FFmpeg 8.1

FFmpeg 8.1 "Hoare" was released on March 16, 2026, introducing xHE-AAC Mps212 decoding, Vulkan compute-based ProRes encoding/decoding, D3D12 H.264/AV1 encoding, Rockchip hardware encoding, and numerous internal improvements including removal of runtime GLSL compilation dependency for Vulkan codecs. The release builds on FFmpeg 8.0 "Huffman" which added native APV/ProRes RAW/RealVideo 6.0 decoders and a new class of pure Vulkan compute-based codecs working on any Vulkan 1.3 implementation.