FFmpeg 6.0 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu 22.04

There are also QSV and NVenc AV1 encoding, VAAPI and QSV decoding and encoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9.

Other changes FFmpeg 6.0 include:

• New audio and video filters, such as adrc, afdelaysrc, corr, showcwt, backgroundkey, a3dscope, ddagrab, ssim360, hstack_qsv, vstack_qsv and xstack_qsv filters

• Radiance HDR image support

• Add new mode to cropdetect filter to detect crop-area based on motion vectors and edges

• WBMP (Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap) image format

• LAF, SDNS demuxer

• DTS to PTS reorder bsf

• backgroundkey filter, showcwt multimedia filter

• hstack_vaapi, vstack_vaapi and xstack_vaapi filters

• MediaCodec decoder via NDKMediaCodec and encoder

• oneVPL support for QSV

• ffmpeg CLI new options: -stats_enc_pre[_fmt], -stats_enc_post[_fmt], -stats_mux_pre[_fmt]

• media100 to mjpegb bsf

• ffmpeg CLI new option: -fix_sub_duration_heartbeat

• CrystalHD decoders deprecated

• RKA, WavArc, XMD ADPCM, WADY DPCM decoder and demuxer

• filtergraph syntax in ffmpeg CLI now supports passing file contents as option values

NOTE: Upgrade FFmpeg library in Ubuntu may break other apps and/or run into dependency issue!! You must know how to restore. And don’t do it in production machine!!

How to Install FFmpeg (6.1 Updated) via PPA in Ubuntu:

NOTE: 1. The PPA so far is for Ubuntu 22.04 only!
NOTE: 2. The packages seem working good in my case. But it may or may not work for you! Use it at your own risk!

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open a terminal window. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/ffmpeg6

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.

2. For Linux Mint 21, you need to manually refresh the package cache after adding PPA. To do so, run the command:

sudo apt update

3. Finally, run the command below to either install or upgrade to FFmpeg 6.1:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

In case of in-complete installation, it’s HIGHLY recommend to run sudo apt upgrade to upgrade all the packages to the latest versions.

4. After installation, run the command below in terminal to verify:

ffmpeg --version

How to Downgrade FFmpeg library:

In case you want to downgrade the FFmpeg library to the stock version available in system repository. Open terminal and run command:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/ffmpeg6

NOTE: Keep an eye on terminal output before answering yes to confirm! It MAY remove some other useful app packages.