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.
They'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.
Sisvel 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.
Trolls 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.
Not 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"
Maybe I’m naive about this, but I didn’t expect AI scrapers to be that big of a load? I mean, it’s not that they need to scrape the same at 1000+ QPS, and even then I wouldn’t expect them to download all media and images either?
What am I missing that explains the gap between this and “constant DDoS” of the site?
I highly doubt there is no other technically feasible option to block the AI bots.
You end up blocking not just bots, but many humans too. When I clicked on the link and the bot block came up, I just clicked back.
I think HN posts should have warnings when the site blocks you from seeing it until you somehow, maybe, prove you are human.
Its 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
> its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable
It's rarely been the citizens that have been the problem, but the governments and companies that seek the use the network connection for their overwhelming benefit.
Re (above):
> Not 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"
No one's even clicking anymore, everything implores me to tap or swipe these days, and everything is optimised for humans with one eye above the other.
Then I press the X to close the all-caps banner commanding me to install the app, upon which I get sent to the app store. Users of the website refer to it as an app.
AV2 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
Glorious. 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).
With 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.
Mostly 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.
About 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)
off 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
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.
Not 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 :)
for dav1d there is https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d although it reuses the dav1d assembly and performance is typically slower by a single-digit percentage.
That 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.
And 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.
It was my first thought when I saw the name, unfortunately. The US constitutes a large portion of this site's user base. Whether the association sticks around is yet to be seen.
It'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.
More 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).
We 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.
Cryptography 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.
Video 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.
Of the 3 software AV1 encoders, the only one that is fully dead is the Rust encoder (rav1e). If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders, they would fund and develop them.
For the codec itself, the majority of it is performance sensitive and often has a significant amount of assembly even, so a memory safe language doesn't change much.
However for the container/extractor... those should absolutely be in a memory safe language, and those are were a lot of the exploits/crashes are, too, as metadata is more fuzzy.
As a practical example of this see something like CrabbyAVIF. All the parser code is rust, but it delegates to dav1d for the actual codec portion
Project description:
If you're out of the loop like me:
- from https://av2.aomedia.org/
> 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.
looks at if AV2 is dead in the water
https://www.sisvel.com/insights/av2-is-coming-sisvel-is-prep...
yep
They'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.
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This is a thinly veiled extortion racket and any competent system would fine them into bankruptcy.
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Sisvel 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.
2 replies →
Trolls 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.
You 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.
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Not 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"
We had to set it up on the parts of VideoLAN infra so the service would remain usable.
Otherwise it was under a constant DDoS by the AI bots.
Maybe I’m naive about this, but I didn’t expect AI scrapers to be that big of a load? I mean, it’s not that they need to scrape the same at 1000+ QPS, and even then I wouldn’t expect them to download all media and images either?
What am I missing that explains the gap between this and “constant DDoS” of the site?
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While I do sympathetize with the AI DDoS situation, it'd be nice if there were a solution that allows them to work so they can pull official docs.
For instance, MCP, static sites that are easy to scale, a cache in front of a dynamic site engine
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I highly doubt there is no other technically feasible option to block the AI bots. You end up blocking not just bots, but many humans too. When I clicked on the link and the bot block came up, I just clicked back. I think HN posts should have warnings when the site blocks you from seeing it until you somehow, maybe, prove you are human.
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Nearly every single website I'm not logged into these days want me to "confirm I'm not a bot".
it is incredibly annoying but what can you do? AI scrapers ruined the web.
The internet is such a Tragedy of the Commons… its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable.
Its 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
6 replies →
> its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable
It's rarely been the citizens that have been the problem, but the governments and companies that seek the use the network connection for their overwhelming benefit.
Re (above):
> Not 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"
1 reply →
No, it is because citizen allow treating them like this.
No one's even clicking anymore, everything implores me to tap or swipe these days, and everything is optimised for humans with one eye above the other.
Then I press the X to close the all-caps banner commanding me to install the app, upon which I get sent to the app store. Users of the website refer to it as an app.
Wow I’m glad it’s not just me. I thought my IP block had gotten caught up in some known spamming or something.
At least this one was significantly faster than Cloudflare and required no action on my part.
I get exactly none of that. Is your adblocker still working?
AI is a gift that keeps on giving.
High hardware prices, locked information sources, plenty of AI slop etc.
renders your gigabit connection pointless
AV2 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
Glorious. 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).
With 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.
Mostly 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.
is there any understanding of how big of an improvment av2 will be over av1?
About 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)
off 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
Just 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-am...
... it says "fast and small AV1 video stream decoder"
... should probably be "AV2" ?
Nice.
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.
I 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.
:)
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Not 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 :)
for dav1d there is https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d although it reuses the dav1d assembly and performance is typically slower by a single-digit percentage.
What are you even implying?
It’s not Rust, therefore it’s bad. Or something. This is getting rather tedious.
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I think they mean that video decoders and encoders tend to have custom assembly code for speedup.
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That 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.
7 replies →
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And 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.
It was my first thought when I saw the name, unfortunately. The US constitutes a large portion of this site's user base. Whether the association sticks around is yet to be seen.
> 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.
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> I'm white and European btw.
Why did you feel the need to explicitly specify that you're white as one of the reasons you didn't hear the news?
I'm not american either, but the news is all over social media platforms like reddit and Twitter, it's hard to turn a blind eye on them.
Its a followup to their existing Dav1d decoder (av1, av2)
Which, should be noted, was a thing before d4vd started his career.
dav1d - started in 2018
d4vd - started composing in 2021
It'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.
More 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).
By this logic nobody should ever name their child Ted or Theodore because Ted Bundy existed.
maybe not great naming. Sounds very similar to the rapper D4vd, who was just arrested for murdering a 14 year old girl
Actually it's closer to https://youtube.com/@dave2d who is a popular tech YouTuber
That is what I thought of too. Almost live David is a popular name or something... /s
I wonder if the author is a Dave2D fan?
https://www.youtube.com/@Dave2D
I think it's an increment on this: https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html
The AV1 decoder is dav1d. The AV2 decoder is dav2d.
One day in the mysterious future the AV3 decoder will be dav3d.
Or a fan of Dangerous Dave 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dave_in_the_Haunted_...
They’re more of a D4vd fan
D4ve's not here!
We 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.
Cryptography 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.
Thank 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
Video 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.
What in the world do you mean by “non-deterministic”?
C compilers, Rust compilers, and assemblers are all deterministic.
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Of the 3 software AV1 encoders, the only one that is fully dead is the Rust encoder (rav1e). If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders, they would fund and develop them.
https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d got funded and developed. it is unfortunately a bit slower (typically by a single-digit percentage) than dav1d.
There are many paths to memory safety, even if the one Rust project seems to be going nowhere.
There's other memory-safe languages, and there's formal verification.
e.g. seL4 favors pancake.
Fully dead in what sense? Seems like it still has active development to me.
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Encoding is a way, way less risky thing to be doing compared to decoding.
> If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders
Really? How many codecs have your neighbors contributed money for the development of, just curious.
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For the codec itself, the majority of it is performance sensitive and often has a significant amount of assembly even, so a memory safe language doesn't change much.
However for the container/extractor... those should absolutely be in a memory safe language, and those are were a lot of the exploits/crashes are, too, as metadata is more fuzzy.
As a practical example of this see something like CrabbyAVIF. All the parser code is rust, but it delegates to dav1d for the actual codec portion
Decoders written in Rust will be a lot slower than the equivalents in assembly.