After three months of hard work, the FFmpeg Project was proud to announce the other day the immediate availability for download of the open-source FFmpeg 2.6 audio/video conversion, recording and streaming software, dubbed "Grothendieck." The release introduces a number of new features and improvements over FFmpeg 2.5.

According to the release notes, NVIDIA and Philip Langdale helped Timo Rothenpieler to add support the Nvidia Video Encoder interface used for H.264 encoding, also known as NVENC. In addition, Anshul Maheswhwari added a decoder that brings initial closed captions support to FFMpeg.

Moreover, several filters have been added and many updated in this major release of FFmpeg, including 10-bit support in spp, the addition of a brand-new color handling filter called colorlevels, the dcshift audio filter, palettegen and paletteuse for creating high-quality GIFs, as well as tblend, which can be used to compare successive frames of a video stream.

“There are many other new features, but let's follow-up on one big cleanup achievement: the libmpcodecs (MPlayer filters) wrapper is finally dead," was stated in the release notes. "So we now secretly hope for Google and Mozilla to use ffvp9 instead of libvpx."

Among other interesting features of FFmpeg 2.6, we can mention several API changes, including device inputs and outputs listing, and lots of optimizations, such as 32-bit (x86) and pre-ssse3 CPUs support for the world’s fastest VP9 decoder, ffvp9, HEVC/H.265 improvements, and ARM NEON optimizations. Download FFmpeg 2.6 right now from Softpedia.