{"slug": "dav1d", "name": "dav1d", "category": "dev-libs", "category_name": "Libraries and frameworks", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 9, "warners": 0, "score": 5.251, "rising": -1.64, "first": "2025-12-04", "latest": "2026-06-01", "why": "lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 6, "neutral": 2, "compare": 2, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": "videolan.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["dav1d"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 773699616, "item_id": 48356226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48356226", "by": "nwallin", "date": "2026-06-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Really amazing piece of software.", "excerpt": "> AV1 software decoding is already very intensive I think you might be misunderestimating how incredible the dav1d AV1 decoder is. Not only does it require less total time than the reference decoder to decode the same video, but it can spread that out over far more threads. I was unable to watch 4k 60fps av1 video on my media center PC (it's from 2019, so predates hardware av1 decoding, and, well, the CPU was a littl", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773542016, "item_id": 48346376, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346376", "by": "throawayonthe", "date": "2026-05-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "yes it makes sense to use C/ASM here", "excerpt": "yes it makes sense to use C/ASM here, but if you're curious, there is a rust port of dav1d named rav1d: https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d it's not much slower than the original C/ASM implementation (last i checked ~5%?) but that matters here", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773528848, "item_id": 48345553, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345553", "by": "breve", "date": "2026-05-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The dav1d decoder is mighty.", "excerpt": "Hardly niche. My laptop isn't new and it has hardware AV1 decoding and encoding. My 10 year old iPhone 7 can play 1080p AV1 video in software for over 200 minutes with VLC. The iPhone 7 was released in 2016, a year and a half before AV1. The dav1d decoder is mighty. Netflix uses AV1: https://netflixtechblog.com/av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-streaming-02f592242d80 YouTube uses AV1. It's tough to be more mainstream th", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 762142032, "item_id": 47633877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633877", "by": "breve", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "dav1d is also mighty.", "excerpt": "> Your \"old iPhone 7\" probably wont even boot up now, let alone play 1080p AV1 video for more than 5 minutes. None of your predictions came true. In fact, you were more than 24 times wrong about it. My 10-year-old iPhone 7 with its 10-year-old battery and a small crack in the screen, hardware which was released before AV1 was released, did boot up. I charged it to 99%. I downloaded a 4 minute music video. It's 1080p2", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means"}, {"id": 762015776, "item_id": 47625986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625986", "by": "breve", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And don't underestimate dav1d", "excerpt": "My laptop has hardware AV1 encoding and decoding. My TV has AV1 decoding. My phone has AV1 decoding. None of these devices are particularly new. And don't underestimate dav1d (https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html). You can comfortably play AV1 video in software on your phone. Try it with VLC.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["av1 video decoding"], "compared": [{"slug": "vlc-media-player", "name": "VLC media player", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344961", "title": "Dav2d", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625385", "title": "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155135", "title": "Netflix\u2019s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343119", "title": "item 48343119", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988504", "title": "Videolan Dav2d", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {"compare": 2, "neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 773699616, "item_id": 48356226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48356226", "by": "nwallin", "date": "2026-06-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Really amazing piece of software.", "excerpt": "> AV1 software decoding is already very intensive I think you might be misunderestimating how incredible the dav1d AV1 decoder is. Not only does it require less total time than the reference decoder to decode the same video, but it can spread that out over far more threads. I was unable to watch 4k 60fps av1 video on my media center PC (it's from 2019, so predates hardware av1 decoding, and, well, the CPU was a littl", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773692640, "item_id": 48355790, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355790", "by": "cogman10", "date": "2026-06-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "there's a reason why dav1d includes hand coded SIMD for common platforms", "excerpt": "Show me the AV1, H.265, or even H.264 decoder that doesn't ultimately rely heavily on hand written assembly to achieve \"fast enough\". You can doubt all you like. Ultimately, there's a reason why dav1d includes hand coded SIMD for common platforms. It's simply impossible to get a compiler to emit something like this [1]. [1] https://github.com/videolan/dav1d/blob/master/src/x86/ipred_avx512.asm#L1297", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773555394, "item_id": 48347212, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347212", "by": "IshKebab", "date": "2026-05-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "They got within 5% of the performance of dav1d", "excerpt": "I don't know why you've been down-voted. It definitely isn't an optimal decision. A video codec isn't all assembly. There's plenty of plain unsafe C code. E.g. this is the first random file I clicked. It has a ton of raw C pointer stuff just begging to be exploited. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav2d/-/blob/main/src/data.c?ref_type=heads There is a project to write an AV1 decoder in Rust: Rav1d (really stretchi", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773542016, "item_id": 48346376, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346376", "by": "throawayonthe", "date": "2026-05-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "yes it makes sense to use C/ASM here", "excerpt": "yes it makes sense to use C/ASM here, but if you're curious, there is a rust port of dav1d named rav1d: https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d it's not much slower than the original C/ASM implementation (last i checked ~5%?) but that matters here", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773528848, "item_id": 48345553, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345553", "by": "breve", "date": "2026-05-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The dav1d decoder is mighty.", "excerpt": "Hardly niche. My laptop isn't new and it has hardware AV1 decoding and encoding. My 10 year old iPhone 7 can play 1080p AV1 video in software for over 200 minutes with VLC. The iPhone 7 was released in 2016, a year and a half before AV1. The dav1d decoder is mighty. Netflix uses AV1: https://netflixtechblog.com/av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-streaming-02f592242d80 YouTube uses AV1. It's tough to be more mainstream th", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dav2d"}, {"id": 773497872, "item_id": 48343617, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343617", "by": "Telaneo", "date": "2026-05-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "dav1d 0.5 can decode 143 FPS of a 1080p 8-bit video", "excerpt": "For reference: dav1d 0.5 can decode 143 FPS of a 1080p 8-bit video on a third gen core i7.[1] I doubt there's been much in the way of regressions since then. 10-bit and 4k is obviously a lot more heavy, but not really relevant to older devices. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/dav1d-0.5 (it's mislabled as a core i3, but the 3770K is a core i7).", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 767924177, "item_id": 47995261, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47995261", "by": "dataking", "date": "2026-05-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "than dav1d", "excerpt": "https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d got funded and developed. it is unfortunately a bit slower (typically by a single-digit percentage) than dav1d.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Videolan Dav2d"}, {"id": 762142032, "item_id": 47633877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633877", "by": "breve", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "dav1d is also mighty.", "excerpt": "> Your \"old iPhone 7\" probably wont even boot up now, let alone play 1080p AV1 video for more than 5 minutes. None of your predictions came true. In fact, you were more than 24 times wrong about it. My 10-year-old iPhone 7 with its 10-year-old battery and a small crack in the screen, hardware which was released before AV1 was released, did boot up. I charged it to 99%. I downloaded a 4 minute music video. It's 1080p2", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means"}, {"id": 762015776, "item_id": 47625986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625986", "by": "breve", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And don't underestimate dav1d", "excerpt": "My laptop has hardware AV1 encoding and decoding. My TV has AV1 decoding. My phone has AV1 decoding. None of these devices are particularly new. And don't underestimate dav1d (https://www.videolan.org/projects/dav1d.html). You can comfortably play AV1 video in software on your phone. Try it with VLC.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means"}, {"id": 738491584, "item_id": 46155724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155724", "by": "snvzz", "date": "2025-12-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Even RISC-V vector assembly[0]. 0. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/-/issues/435", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Netflix\u2019s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond"}, {"id": 738490592, "item_id": 46155662, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155662", "by": "FrostKiwi", "date": "2025-12-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration", "excerpt": "Thanks to libdav1d's [1] lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration, but basically yes: From Snapdragon 8 onwards, Google Tensor G3 onwards, NVIDIA RTX 3000 series onwards. All relatively new . [1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d", "context": "", "use_case": "AV1 video decoding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Netflix\u2019s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond"}]}