TL;DR
FFmpeg 8.0 "Huffman" adds a native whisper audio filter (transcription is now a filter, not a separate service) and av1_vulkan, a cross-vendor GPU AV1 encoder. We'll generate SRT + JSON captions in one command, then write a script that probes for av1_vulkan and falls back to SVT-AV1 when the GPU or driver isn't ready.
FFmpeg 8.0 shipped in late August 2025. Two features change what your pipeline can offload to FFmpeg itself: speech-to-text and GPU-vendor-agnostic AV1 encoding. Let's actually run both.
1. Confirm you're on 8.0+
ffmpeg -version | head -n 1
