TL;DR

FFmpeg 8.x includes av1_vulkan, the first cross-vendor GPU AV1 encoder in mainline FFmpeg. We'll probe whether your GPU + driver actually expose AV1 encode, run a first working encode, benchmark it against SVT-AV1 on your own content, and talk about which jobs deserve it.

Until FFmpeg 8.0 ("Huffman", released August 2025), GPU AV1 encoding meant picking a vendor: av1_nvenc for NVIDIA RTX 40+, av1_amf for AMD, av1_qsv for Intel Arc. Three code paths, three sets of flags, three driver stacks. The Vulkan Video encode work gives FFmpeg one encoder that reaches all three vendors through the standard VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension.

The catch: driver support is a lottery. Plenty of capable hardware sits behind drivers that don't expose the encode extension yet. So before any pipeline decisions, we probe.

1. Check what you're running