rav2d is a Rust port of dav2d, a cross-platform AV2 video decoder focused on speed, correctness, and memory safety.

Status: Early development. The AV2 specification is not yet finalized. Do not use in production.

Goals

• Bit-exact AV2 decoding, matching dav2d output
• Memory safety for all parsing and decode logic (where most CVEs occur)
• Shared assembly optimizations with dav2d via FFI (x86 SSE/AVX2/AVX-512, ARM Neon, RISC-V, LoongArch)
• Drop-in C API compatibility for existing dav2d consumers
• Native Rust API for Rust ecosystem integration

Crate Structure

Approach

Following the proven rav1d strategy:

1. FFI bindings to dav2d's hand-optimized assembly (shared, not rewritten)
2. Progressive C-to-Rust port of the core decoder
3. Conformance testing at every step against dav2d test data

Building

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.85+
• dav2d installed on system (via meson/ninja), or set PKG_CONFIG_PATH
• LLVM/clang (for bindgen)

Build

# First, build and install dav2d
cd dav2d
mkdir build && cd build
meson setup .. && ninja
sudo ninja install

# Then build rav2d
cd ../..
cargo build

License

BSD 2-Clause, same as dav2d.

Acknowledgments

• dav2d by VideoLAN / Alliance for Open Media
• rav1d by Prossimo / ISRG — the reference for this porting approach
• dav1d — the AV1 predecessor