The Shotcut 26.1 beta was released overnight as the newest version of this Qt6-based, cross-platform video editing solution. Standing out the most with this new development release are some new GPU-accelerated hardware decode options for aiming to help speed-up this free software video editor.

First up for the Preview Scaling there is now the option to use hardware decoding and it defaults to on. For Shotcut on Linux this will use the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) while on Microsoft Windows is using Media Foundation and then Video Toolbox under macOS. Though the release announcement sums up the hardware decoder benefits here as: "Do not expect to be blown away by speediness unless perhaps you are using Linear 10-bit CPU processing mode."

This hardware decoding for the preview scaling does at least help reduce CPU usage and in turn battery life for laptop users. Due to not employing zero-copy, there is a lot of RAM-to-vRAM copies that for higher resolution video (above 1080p) can lead to slower performance than the CPU-based, software-decode scaling.

The other new hardware decode feature of Shotcut 26.1 Beta is to use the hardware decoder on video export. This can help reduce CPU usage too but is disabled by default since it often increases the export time.

Those wishing to learn more about these features can do so via the Shotcut 26.1 beta announcement.