Install openapv with Homebrew, dnf, Nix, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• oapv_app_dec
• oapv_app_enc

Project history

Samsung Electronics unveiled the APV codec in 2023 and contributed the source code that became OpenAPV. On October 31, 2024, the Academy Software Foundation announced OpenAPV as a sandbox project led by Samsung Electronics, framing it as an open source path for professional-grade video recording and cloud editing.

The OpenAPV repository presents the project as a reference implementation for APV bitstreams and metadata. Its README emphasizes perceptually lossless quality, intra-frame coding, tile-based multithreading, HDR metadata support, bitrate control modes, and CPU optimizations for ARM NEON and x86 SIMD.

Adoption history

APV gained standards visibility through RFC 9924, which lists OpenAPV in its implementation appendix and describes the project as conformant to the APV document with test bitstreams for verification. The same appendix also names Android Open Source Project and FFmpeg implementation work, making OpenAPV part of the codec's interoperability story rather than only a sample encoder.

The ASWF adoption matters because the foundation is already home to production-oriented media infrastructure projects. OpenAPV entered that ecosystem as smartphone capture, creator workflows, and cloud-based post-production created demand for high-quality intermediate video formats outside proprietary codec stacks.

How it is used

Developers use OpenAPV as encoder and decoder source code, command-line tools, and conformance material for APV workflows. Its Homebrew package exposes `oapv_app_enc` and `oapv_app_dec`, while the upstream repository includes test bitstreams that implementers can use to check decoder behavior.

The practical use case is intermediate professional video: high-bitrate 2K, 4K, and 8K material, chroma formats from 4:2:2 through 4:4:4 and alpha-bearing profiles, and metadata-heavy video pipelines where editors want much less degradation than distribution-oriented codecs allow.

Why package nerds care

OpenAPV is interesting to package nerds because it is a young codec implementation crossing several packaging boundaries at once: media standards, ASWF governance, mobile capture, FFmpeg/Android ecosystem work, and CPU-specific performance paths. It is the kind of package whose command-line tools may be small while the codec politics around it are large.

The package also gives distributions a clean, royalty-free implementation target for APV experiments. For codec stacks, that is the useful bit: a reference implementation, public conformance vectors, and a permissively licensed path to build/test integration without waiting for a vendor SDK.

Timeline

• 2023: Samsung Electronics unveiled the APV codec.
• 2024-10-31: The Academy Software Foundation announced OpenAPV as a sandbox hosted project led by Samsung Electronics.
• 2026: RFC 9924 documented Advanced Professional Video and listed OpenAPV, AOSP, and FFmpeg-related APV implementations in its implementation appendix.

Related projects

• Related ecosystem pieces include the APV specification in RFC 9924, Android's APV support, FFmpeg's APV encoder/decoder work, and the broader Academy Software Foundation project set for media-production infrastructure.

Sources

• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9924/
• https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openapv
• https://www.aswf.io/news/academy-software-foundation-adopts-openapv-as-a-hosted-project-led-by-new-premier-member-samsung-electronics/