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
Published 2026-08-04 · Updated
Short answer
FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," is the open-source media engine's 2026 major release, tagged on August 3, 2026. Its headline addition is a native animated WebP decoder and demuxer. It also adds more GPU paths (Vulkan, NVIDIA CUDA, AMD AMF), SMPTE 2094-50 HDR metadata support and an ONNX Runtime backend, and removes standalone CELT decoding. Most creators get it through the apps built on FFmpeg, not by installing it.
Key takeaways
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.
A real listicle video generated in the Kompozy workspace. It shows the format as Kompozy outputs it; it was not made about this story.
Best for:
Not ideal for:
FFmpeg 9.0, codenamed "Lei," was tagged on August 3, 2026. The release notes say it arrived about four months after FFmpeg 8.1.
Native animated WebP support, through a new decoder and demuxer. The release also adds Vulkan, CUDA and AMD AMF processing, SMPTE 2094-50 HDR metadata and an ONNX Runtime backend for its DNN filters.
It removed standalone CELT decoding and Ogg CELT parsing; Opus CELT is not affected. It also dropped deprecated NVENC options and support for NVIDIA SDK versions before 11.1.
Usually not. Most people use ffmpeg inside other apps, which pick up the improvements as they update. Kompozy runs ffmpeg on its render workers, so the video it renders uses the engine for you.
We checked every date, figure and product claim on this page against the sources listed below on 2026-10-23. Every feature listed matches the version 9.0 section of FFmpeg's Changelog, and the release date is the commit date of the n9.0 tag on GitHub. Kompozy plan and format details come from kompozy.io/pricing.
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