July 2026

The Rust decoder Chrome vendored is now cutting tagged releases, two in one day no less. Versioned releases are how a vendored experiment turns into a dependable dependency, and each one is a small signal that the JPEG XL bet is being maintained, which is precisely the condition Chrome set for turning it on by default.

The reference AV1 implementation turns its attention to still images: v3.14 improves layered and progressive AVIF encoding. Progressive rendering is the one trick old JPEG had that AVIF lacked, an image that sharpens as it loads rather than arriving in a wipe, so encoder support here matters for how AVIF pages feel on slow connections.

Thirty months in every major engine is the bar for Baseline Widely Available, and AVIF just cleared it. For cautious teams this is the formal permission slip to ship AVIF without agonising over fallbacks, though a JPEG fallback in a picture element still costs one line, and our format comparison shows what each choice buys.

A lighter one: a project that recreates cassette-deck character, frequency response, saturation, hiss, entirely with FFmpeg filter graphs. A good reminder that the filter engine is a full audio DSP playground, and a fine source of incantations to steal for less nostalgic work.

Two stories in one release. Vulkan video decoding gives Linux hardware decode a path that does not depend on VA-API, which NVIDIA users will feel first. And JPEG XL becomes an opt-in experiment in Firefox Labs, meaning both major open engines now carry a JXL decoder that is one switch away from default, Chrome behind its flag and Firefox behind Labs.

The encoder FFmpeg recommends for AV1 distribution encodes, and the one our convert and compress pages name as libsvtav1. Its point releases keep landing roughly quarterly, and each one tends to buy either speed at the same preset or compression at the same speed; if you encode AV1 in production, tracking them is free efficiency.

The decoder that actually plays the web’s AV1: dav1d is what browsers and most players ship, so its quiet maintenance releases reach more devices than almost any codec news on this page. Boring in the best possible way; update and move on.

For years the honest advice was “use libfdk_aac, the built-in AAC is mediocre”. That era may be ending: the native encoder has been rewritten with an overhauled psychoacoustic model, and FFmpeg’s own metrics and listening tests place it ahead of fdk-aac and Apple’s qAAC. It missed the 9.0 cut and ships in 9.1, and because this encoder sits behind countless defaults (OBS included), the average AAC on the internet is about to get better.

Encoding gets a 2 to 5 times multi-threaded speedup, progressive lossless images come out 30 to 40% smaller, and the notes flag numerous security fixes that make updating less than optional for anyone running libjxl server-side. A new jxltran tool extracts codestreams from JXLP boxes.