A new maintenance release is out and ready for download

Feb 4, 2016 10:52 GMT  ·  By

FFmpeg is a complete suite of tools used to record, convert and stream audio and video. A new update has been released for the main branch and developers have also made an interesting announcement regarding the removal of support for two external AAC encoders.

The new 2.8 branch of FFMpeg was launched back in September 2015, and the team has released quite a few system updates since then. As you can see, the latest one is now 2.8.6. It's not a major upgrade, but as usual, it's a good idea to get the newest one anyway.

This is not the kind of application that you upgrade manually, so it's best to wait until it becomes available in your repository. Also, the developers made the decision to drop the support for a couple of external AAC encoders.

What changed in FFmpeg 2.8.6

"We have just removed support for VisualOn AAC encoder (libvo-aacenc) and libaacplus in FFmpeg master. Even before marking our internal AAC encoder as stable, it was known that libvo-aacenc was of an inferior quality compared to our native one for most samples. However, the VisualOn encoder was used extensively by the Android Open Source Project, and we would like to have a tested-and-true stable option in our code base," the developers explained.

The following packages have been upgraded and are now available: libavutil, libavcodec, libavformat, libavdevice, libavfilter, libavresample, libswscale, libswresample, and libpostpro.

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play virtually any media that humans and machines have created.

Since a new major version of FFmpeg is usually released every three months, it's high time for a new one, so we can expect them to switch to 3.0 pretty soon.

A complete list of updates, features, and other fixes can be found in the official announcement. The source package for FFmpeg can be downloaded from Softpedia, but this is just the source.