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VideoLAN releases dav2d 0.0.1 “Merbanan,” an early preview AV2 decoder and successor to its widely used dav1d AV1 project. [linuxiac.com]

VideoLAN, the organization behind VLC media player, has released dav2d 0.0.1 “Merbanan [videolan.org],” 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 [linuxiac.com], the royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. Earlier this year, AOMedia released a draft AV2 specification [aomedia.org] 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 [videolan.org].

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