FFmpeg boosts performance of Apple ProRes codec on Windows platforms by up to 20%

FFmpeg, the comprehensive cross-platform solution for recording, converting, and streaming audio and video, recently unveiled patch notes indicating a notable boost in performance for the Apple ProRes codec on Win64 and Win32 platforms.

The enhanced performance demonstrates an approximate 20% speedup on Win64 and a 14% speedup on Win32. However, the patch notes don't report any performance improvement for macOS, Linux, and BSD.

In addition to the speedup, the release notes detail other modifications. Among these are a return to the regular, non-macro, get_bits API, a reduction in the lookup to switch the coding method, and shorter reads where feasible, especially for the end of bitstream (16 bits instead of the previous 32).