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Dav2d
- jzebedee 6mo agoProject description: dav2d is the fastest AV2 decoder on all platforms :) Targeted to be small, portable and very fast. If you're out of the loop like me: AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates. It is optimized for the evolving demands of streaming, broadcasting, and real-time video conferencing. - from https://av2.aomedia.org/ https://av2.aomedia.org/
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- delfinom 6mo agolooks at if AV2 is dead in the water https://www.sisvel.com/insights/av2-is-coming-sisvel-is-prepared/ https://www.sisvel.com/insights/av2-is-coming-sisvel-is-prep... yep
- ronsor 6mo agoThis is a thinly veiled extortion racket and any competent system would fine them into bankruptcy.
- mort96 6mo agoWe need a more efficient way to eliminate bullshit patents or bullshit patent infringement claims than "violate them then spend millions on lawyers to fight them in court".
- brookst 6mo agoSure, and at the same time we need a more efficient way to ensure big companies can’t just take what they want and bury anyone who complains. It’s not an easy problem.
- voakbasda 6mo agoStop big companies from ever forming. They are not a natural force that cannot be reckoned with. We allow them to exist. Revoke the charters of any business over 500 employees.
- pmontra 6mo agoI can see a number of ways to work around that limitation, without even lobbying and bribing. And I'm not even a lawyer or an accountant. Eventually all the money and power will converge in a few sub 500, or sub 50, companies and nothing will change.
- extraduder_ire 6mo agoDoes that happen in places like Europe, where software patents aren't a thing?
- account42 6mo agoRight now we have neither so working on one can't make the other worse.
- WhyNotHugo 6mo agoEliminate software patents.
- imtringued 6mo agoThe disgusting part is that they are proud of how complicated and exploitable this patent situation is, acting as if they were the key experts in developing codecs when they are just experts in gating access to them. Like, their entire business model is based on negating the value of the inventions.
- walrus01 6mo agoSisvel is a patent troll. Take a look at the combined list of all companies that are the AOM and tell me with a straight face that all of their corporate in house counsel specializing in intellectual property law are wrong.
- asveikau 6mo agoI don't know this stuff super well but I imagine it's not necessarily about the lawyers being right or wrong so much as what they can convince people of. The ideal scenario for the patent troll is they can intimidate you into licensing with them. Another good outcome for them (though more costly) is they can convince some non-expert in court. In either case the big players behind the codec can defend themselves but a small one just picking it up downstream as OSS can't.
- walrus01 6mo agoI don't doubt for a minute that they are going to attempt to intimidate companies using av1 which are much smaller than the AOM founders.
- Telaneo 6mo agoThey've done the same thing with AV1, and I can't see that having prevented adoption, nor can I imagine Sisvel wanting to poke the bear that is AOMedia unless they're certain their case is absolutely watertight.
- walrus01 6mo agoI see zero public evidence that they've filed any lawsuits against the members of AOM in any jurisdiction. I'm sure there's been a lot of threatening letters sent...
- Telaneo 6mo agoSame, which is what makes it seem to me that that case is absolutely not watertight. Those patents are probably all about esoteric minutiae (to be fair, that's because that's what it takes to make a better video codec these days) and everything and anything that can seemingly be connected to AV2 (or AV1 for that matter), many of which have only gotten a patent because the person approving it only barely understands what it's saying.
- jorvi 6mo agoYup. The Dolby/Disney vs Snapchat lawsuit is going to be the first one. So far it's only been filed. The big question is if AOMedia is going to make good on their Mutually Assured Destruction promise of using their patent and financial war chest to to countersue into oblivion anyone trying to go after AV1 adaptors.
- dmitrygr 6mo agoI would love to live in a world where this happens. I will place big bets that it will, regrettably not happen.
- LelouBil 6mo agoContext: https://www.techspot.com/news/111865-dolby-sues-snap-over-video-compression-patent-claims.html https://www.techspot.com/news/111865-dolby-sues-snap-over-vi...
- BLKNSLVR 6mo agoYou can tell Sisvel are a bunch of grifters by the fact they use slight grey text on a slightly less grey background. Aesthetics over function; style over substance. If that's their web design policy it's likely their policy in all other aspects. I'm also not sure that they're aware that intellectual property rights no longer exist in the US. If AV2 was vibe coded, there would be no case.
- astrange 6mo ago> If AV2 was vibe coded, there would be no case. …for copyright. Not for anything else. Patents would still apply.
- shmerl 6mo agoTrolls will always be trolls. The need to fight them just shows the need to reform the garbage patent system to make sure no one can ever patent software.
- hulitu 6mo ago> AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media Oh no. Not another one. I presume this one makes lossy better, or faster or both.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoWhy do you not want another one? We're approaching a decade since AV1 released. There's plenty of improvement to put into a new format.
- hulitu 6mo ago> There's plenty of improvement to put into a new format Like what ? Lossy compression has nothing to offer since about 10 years ago. Is there a flac for video ? Is there a codec able to "guarantee" DVD quality on today's internet ? Those "up to" really sound like "up your's".
- Dylan16807 6mo ago> Like what ? Lossy compression has nothing to offer since about 10 years ago. h.266 is about 1/3 smaller than AV1, so it fits about 50% more video per megabyte at the same quality. AV2 will almost certainly be better than h.266 > Is there a flac for video ? ProRes is a close equivalent. > Is there a codec able to "guarantee" DVD quality on today's internet ? Those "up to" really sound like "up your's". Basically no. You won't find a video distribution codec that guarantees any level of quality because they're all configurable. And youtube in particular is always tweaking the quality dial as low as they can. But if you can get a bitrate that would be passable with h.264, then AV1 will look good and AV2 will look great at the same bitrate. And they can all beat a DVD with a fraction of the bitrate. You just have to not get greedy.
- wolfi1 6mo agois there already an av2 encoder for ffmpeg?
- jbk 6mo agoNo, since the format is not final.
- simlevesque 6mo agoThen how can there be a decoder if it's not final ?
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo agoit's a decoder of the current draft
- dylan604 6mo agoYou seem to be unfamiliar with the concepts of alpha and beta or other pre-release software. Seems a strange thing to be unfamiliar though in 2026
- saratogacx 6mo agoIf you see the state of what is called "production quality" software these days, alpha/beta quality has lost most of its meaning. You now just wait for "next prod" // I jest... but only to hide the sadness
- Dylan16807 6mo agoNo, they're pointing out how the logic they're replying to is flawed. If there can be a decoder, there can be an encoder.
- BoingBoomTschak 6mo agoThe bitstream could be "final" without the coding tools being so.
- dirasieb 6mo agoi don't even own a dgpu capable of encoding av1 and they're already coming out with av2?
- dylan604 6mo agoIf the thing you are working on is already out of date to the point there is already significant work on the 2 version, why would you continue?
- tensor 6mo agoNot on topic, but wow the internet has very quickly devolved into: click -> "making sure you're not a bot", click -> "making sure you're a human", click -> "COOKIES COOKIES COOKIES", click -> "cloudflare something something"
- port11 6mo agoThe internet is such a Tragedy of the Commons… its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable.
- honktime 6mo agoIts pretty explicitly not a tragedy of the commons. Its a tragedy of the ruling class abusing the resources of the 'commons' to extract value. There is nothing 'commons' about trillion dollar companies extracting all available value from the labor of the working class. That's just the tragedy that'll bring around the death of society, the same tragedy that brings all other tragedys
- amusingimpala75 6mo agoThank you for describing the tragedy of the commons
- multjoy 6mo agoThe commons were never unregulated. This is a tragedy of enclosure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
- port11 6mo agoWe might get stuck discussing semantics. Large parts of the internet remain public and open; but an incredibly vast part of it is a toxic wasteland. It’s true that many spaces people frequent are ‘enclosed’, but these are also less subject to the abuse taking place in the public and open areas.
- xnx 6mo ago[flagged]
- cosmotic 6mo agoIts a followup to their existing Dav1d decoder (av1, av2)
- cogman10 6mo agoWhich, should be noted, was a thing before d4vd started his career. dav1d - started in 2018 d4vd - started composing in 2021
- NewsaHackO 6mo agoIt's just unfortunate. Like there was a pharmaceutical company named "Isis" that changed their name due to the association with the terrorist group. That said, while people will notice for the next couple of months, I don't think it warrants changing a name for.
- cozzyd 6mo agoMore importantly there's a really good band named isis that probably has not benefitted from the Islamic state. (Ok, they disbanded in 2010, but still).
- virtualritz 6mo agoAnd who ever heard of this in the majority of the world? It was news to me, I'm white and European btw. Did you know the US consititues about 4% of humans? When we look at adults and age range that likely ever hear of D4vd we are talking probably considerably less that 1%. The rest of humanity has no negative association with these four letters.
- DaiPlusPlus 6mo ago> And who ever heard of this in the majority of the world? It was news to me, I'm white and European btw. It's a recurring headline on the rolling news channels on broadcast TV right now - and it's on the front-page of Reddit for me as well.
- Zopieux 6mo ago>video decoder implementation >look inside >it's C
- tux3 6mo agoNot just C, dav1d and dav2d are actually mostly written in ASM! Then there's a bit of C as the glue or for functions that don't have optimized ASM yet. Since dav2d is newer it has a higher fraction of C, but not enough for it to be the main language in the codebase :)
- Almondsetat 6mo agoWhat are you even implying?
- notenlish 6mo agoI think they mean that video decoders and encoders tend to have custom assembly code for speedup.
- Almondsetat 6mo agoAnd? It's common knowledge that the "reference" or "research" version of any codec is always quite high level to get development going and actually produce a working bitstream
- sergiotapia 6mo ago[flagged]
- IshKebab 6mo agoThat codecs should be written in safer languages given that they usually process untrusted files. There have been a number of serious hacks from file parsing bugs due to them being written in unsafe languages. There's literally a DSL designed for this purpose (Wuffs) so it would be interesting to hear why they didn't use it.
- 6mo ago
- dcsommer 6mo agoWe must not continue to develop media codecs in memory unsafe languages. Small, auditable sections can opt-out perhaps, but choosing default-unsafe for this type of software is close to professional negligence.
- fguerraz 6mo agoCryptography and video codecs are notable exceptions, they put a lot of effort to making the code provably memory safe: no recursion, limited use of stack variables, no dynamic allocations, etc. As a result, memory safe languages bring nothing but trouble by making it non deterministic, that’s especially true for crypto where compiler “optimisations” guarantee you side channels attacks.
- WhatIsDukkha 6mo agoThank you for mentioning this. I wonder IFF Rust had an effects system that a Jasmin MIR transform (ie like SPIRV is for shaders) would be useful? https://github.com/jasmin-lang/jasmin https://github.com/jasmin-lang/jasmin
- astrange 6mo agoVideo codecs just don't need to do dynamic allocations because it's not relevant to the problem. There's still certainly plenty of opportunities for memory bugs because there's a lot of pointer math.
- simonask 6mo agoWhat in the world do you mean by “non-deterministic”? C compilers, Rust compilers, and assemblers are all deterministic.
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago> C compilers, Rust compilers, and assemblers are all deterministic. Within a version, yes, but not cross version. Different versions of GCC/Clang etc can give you completely different code.
- sylware 6mo agoI would even remove the C code and lower the usage of the assembler pre-processor to a basic C pre-processor. Happy, AV2 decoding already here. :)
- Telaneo 6mo agoGlorious. Really looking forward to seeing how much better than AV1 it actually turns out to be. It's a shame it'll take a while before we'll have a decent encoder (it took an annoyingly long time until SVT-AV1 was usable).
- kylec 6mo agoI wonder if the author is a Dave2D fan? https://www.youtube.com/@Dave2D https://www.youtube.com/@Dave2D
- foo-bar-baz529 6mo agoThey’re more of a D4vd fan
- DonHopkins 6mo agoD4ve's not here!
- 7bees 6mo agoI think it's an increment on this: https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html
- d3Xt3r 6mo agoOr a fan of Dangerous Dave 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dave_in_the_Haunted_Mansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dave_in_the_Haunted_...
- breve 6mo agoThe AV1 decoder is dav1d. The AV2 decoder is dav2d. One day in the mysterious future the AV3 decoder will be dav3d.
- pkos98 6mo agooff topic, but related to the recent github alternative discussion: Wow, this gitlab instance looked so much cleaner/simpler and less clunky than my past experiences! Also loaded really fast on first page load as well as subsequent actions
- toasty228 6mo agoGitlab has been better than github in almost every aspect for a few years already, I don't understand why anyone still bother with github at that point
- 0x0 6mo agoJust recently noticed this got posted to deb-multimedia, although I think there is a typo in the package description.... https://www.deb-multimedia.org/dists/unstable/main/binary-amd64/package/dav2d https://www.deb-multimedia.org/dists/unstable/main/binary-am... ... it says "fast and small AV1 video stream decoder" ... should probably be "AV2" ?
- coconut08 6mo agois there any understanding of how big of an improvment av2 will be over av1?
- ChadNauseam 6mo agoAbout 30% better compression than AV1 at equivalent quality. But it'll be a while before it's a good idea to use AV2 in your home media server. (AV1 is still not that broadly supported)
- account42 6mo ago> About 30% better compression than AV1 at equivalent quality. Claimed by the authors or actually based on anything more than "trust me bro"?
- arkensaw 6mo agomaybe not great naming. Sounds very similar to the rapper D4vd, who was just arrested for murdering a 14 year old girl
- jofzar 6mo agoActually it's closer to https://youtube.com/@dave2d https://youtube.com/@dave2d who is a popular tech YouTuber
- bl4ckneon 6mo agoThat is what I thought of too. Almost live David is a popular name or something... /s
- hackerlytest 6mo agoHuh, I also thought the same
- bloggie 6mo agoMaybe he should change his name so it's not confused with a popular video codec.
- infogulch 6mo agoAV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025 (videocardz.com) | Oct 2025 | 277 points | 223 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45547537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45547537
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6mo agoI care much less about bitrates than about hopefully finally settling on one series of "standards". It looks like H.266 is dead in the water (I haven't even heard of it existing) so we might finally settle on AV2 as "the" new standard, rather than having the infight with half of hard/software only supporting either the state-of-the-art codec from the H26x or the AVx series...
- Beretta_Vexee 6mo agoDon’t worry, hardware manufacturers are going to keep ripping us off with HDR encoding. HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and so on.
- shmerl 6mo agoNice. What's the current state of of Dolby trying too attack AV1 ecosystem (Snapchat more specifically)? I hope there is an organized fight back by AOM against these trolls.
- razighter777 6mo agoAgreed. Software patents were a mistake in general. It is impossible to implement a modern video codec without using work in patents because of how overbroad and poorly written they tend to be.
- amitbidlan 6mo agoMostly ASM for performance critical paths is a pattern that never gets old. The VideoLAN team did the same with dav1d and it paid off. Curious how much of dav2d ends up staying C as AV2 matures.
- snvzz 6mo agoWith the first RVA23 boards shipping this month, I find it a mistake to still focus on legacy ISAs like x86 or ARM rather than what will be dominant by the time AV2 is deployed.
- surajrmal 6mo agoriscv is primarily used in microcontroller or peripheral cores on an soc. It'll be a while yet until it is competitive on application cores that applications people run on such that we adopt it in mass. Arm and x86 are also not legacy or going away. The choice to focus on them is rational at this time.
- snvzz 6mo agoI hear you, I disagree. We do not need to argue over this, but rather, we can see what happens over the next couple years.
- surajrmal 6mo agoWhat is your criteria to measure this by and over what time scale? In 5 years, I have doubts we will see even 5% penetration of riscv on platforms which end user software runs (outside of China). I wish I could be more optimistic, but after paying attention to the standards process due many years and seeing the landscape evolve, I've become pesemistic on the matter. Even after hardware is competitive, software support will continue to lag. This culminates in security, performance and power challenges that would regress user experience compared to arm and limit adoption by device makers.
- abhishek03113 6mo agoSome dude at videolan be like, I've have a cool name idea
- kk_mors 6mo ago[dead]
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoA little extra context: Dav1d was the surprisingly fast assembly implementation of AV1 decoding. Even for something in hand-coded platform-specific-assembly I think the general impression was that they'd done amazing work to really chase down every last bit of potential performance. It didn't initially exist when AV1 was first rolled out and its arrival was a step change in powering adoption on devices without hardware decoding. Dav2d is likely to play a similar role, but it exists from the start of AV2 and can build on the work of dav1d, so should have an even bigger effect. In a weird reverse chicken and egg scenario, having really good software decode that can be deployed will spur on hardware development and adoption due to network effects.
- jiffygist 6mo agoWhere do I get example AV2 videos to test it?
- thebeardisred 6mo agoI've noticed that a number of comments seem to have missed the recursive naming pattern: Dav1d AV1 Decoder Dav2d AV2 Decoder Just like "GNU's Not Unix"