FFmpegKit is retired — here's how to fix your Android build (NDK r26c patch)

LucQuebec — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:35:14 +0000

What happened

On April 1, 2025, FFmpegKit was officially retired and all
prebuilt binaries were removed from Maven Central overnight.
If your Android build suddenly started failing with:

Could not find com.arthenica:ffmpeg-kit-full:6.0-2

...you're not alone. Thousands of Android projects broke
the same day.

The NDK r26c problem

After digging through build logs, I found a second issue
for anyone trying to compile from source with NDK r26c —
clang strict mode rejects a bit-field initializer in
fftools_ffmpeg_mux_init.c:

error: implicit truncation from 'int' to a one-bit wide
bit-field changes value from 1 to -1
[-Werror,-Wsingle-bit-bitfield-constant-conversion]

The original FFmpegKit code was never updated for NDK r26c's
stricter clang behavior.

The fix

One line in android/jni/Android.mk:

LOCAL_CFLAGS := -Wall -Wextra -Werror \
-Wno-single-bit-bitfield-constant-conversion \
-Wno-unused-parameter

What I built

Instead of migrating away from FFmpegKit, I decided to
maintain a patched Android-only fork:

arm64-v8a (modern devices only)
API 24+ (Android 7.0+)
NDK r26c compatible
compileSdk/targetSdk 35
16KB page size alignment for Android 15+
Android MediaCodec hardware acceleration
LGPL-3.0

Prebuilt AAR available — search "ffmpegkit-maintained"
on GitHub.
https://github.com/ffmpegkit-maintained/ffmpeg-kit

Quick setup

Place the AAR in your app/libs/ folder and add to
your build.gradle:

dependencies {
implementation fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.aar'])
implementation 'com.arthenica:smart-exception-java9:0.2.1'
}

Why Android-only?

Maintaining FFmpegKit across Android, iOS, Flutter and
React Native is a full-time job — that's partly why the
original maintainer retired it. Focusing on Android only
keeps the scope manageable and the builds reliable.

What's next

Full variant with additional codecs
GPL variant with x264/x265
Maven Central publication (namespace already verified)
CI/CD pipeline for automated builds

The project is early but functional.
Happy to answer questions in the comments.

DEV Community: LucQuebec