VideoLAN, the organization behind VLC media player, has released dav2d 0.0.1 “Merbanan,” the first public preview of its AV2 decoder and successor to the widely used dav1d AV1 decoder.
VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf prepared the release, describing it as “a very early preview release of an AV2 decoder.”
AV2 is the planned successor to AV1, the royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. Earlier this year, AOMedia released a draft AV2 specification for public review after several years of development. The codec remains in the standardization process, so dav2d is an early implementation rather than production-ready software.
The new decoder builds on the approach established by dav1d, VideoLAN’s AV1 decoder developed with the FFmpeg community, which played a key role in AV1 adoption by offering a fast, cross-platform software decoder while hardware support was still expanding.
dav2d is intended to serve a similar role for AV2, though it remains in the early stages of development. The decoder is CPU-based, cross-platform, and built on dav1d, with ongoing work on the C implementation, API, platform support, and architecture-specific optimizations.
Last but not least, VideoLAN has not announced when dav2d will be integrated into a stable VLC release, but that certainly won’t happen anytime soon. At the moment, it only lays the groundwork for future playback support in open-source multimedia software as the codec and ecosystem mature.
dav2d 0.0.1 is available through VideoLAN’s official GitLab repository.
