FFmpeg 8.0

Happy to hear that they've introduced video encoders and decoders based on compute shaders. The only video codecs widely supported in hardware are H.264, H.265 and AV1, so cross-platform acceleration for other codecs will be very nice to have, even if it's less efficient than fixed-function hardware. The new ProRes encoder already looks useful for a project I'm working on.

> Only codecs specifically designed for parallelised decoding can be implemented in such a way, with more mainstream codecs not being planned for support.

It makes sense that most video codecs aren't amenable to compute shader decoding. You need tens of thousands of threads to keep a GPU busy, and you'll struggle to get that much parallelism when you have data dependencies between frames and between tiles in the same frame.

I wonder whether encoders might have more flexibility than decoders. Using compute shaders to encode something like VP9 (https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/12/13/overview-of-the-v...) would be an interesting challenge.

These release notes are very interesting! I spent a couple of weeks recently writing a ProRes decoder using WebGPU compute shaders, and it runs plenty fast enough (although I suspect Apple has some special hardware they make use of for their implementation). I can imagine this path also working well for the new Android APV codec, if it ever becomes popular.

The ProRes bitstream spec was given to SMPTE [1], but I never managed to find any information on ProRes RAW, so it's exciting to see software and compute implementations here. Has this been reverse-engineered by the FFMPEG wizards? At first glance of the code, it does look fairly similar to the regular ProRes.

[1] https://pub.smpte.org/doc/rdd36/20220909-pub/rdd36-2022.pdf