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memorysafety
rav1d
Assembly2024–2026
memorysafety / rav1d

rav1d

An AV1 decoder in Rust.

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
8Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
652GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An AV1 decoder in Rust.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2024-09-03 23:39:16 UTC to 2026-05-31 20:29:53 UTC.

0123452024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsSep 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsJul 20252025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 commentsMay 2026

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Sep 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Oct 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20242024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC404
Jun 20252025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20252025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20252025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20252025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20252025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20252025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20252025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Jan 20262026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20262026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC505

What Hacker News says

4 sources
unlord·May 27, 2025
Someone asked about benchmarks, so I ran these just now to bring data to the discussion: nathan@arm1:~/git/rav1d.new/target$ hyperfine --warmup 2 "release/dav1d -q -i ~/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps.ivf -o /dev/null --threads 8" Benchmark 1: release/dav1d -q -i ~/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps.ivf -o /dev/null --threads 8 Time (mean ± σ): 31.532 s ± 1.971 s [User: 244.512 s, System: 1.644 s] Range (min … max): 28.498 s … 34.270 s 10 runs nathan@arm1:~/git/dav1d.new/build$ hyperfine --warmup 2 "tools/dav1d -q -i ~/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps.ivf -o /dev/null --threads 8" Benchmark 1: tools/dav1d -q -i ~/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps.ivf -o /dev/null --threads 8 Time (mean ± σ): 29.696 s ± 2.308 s [User: 230.507 s, System: 1.479 s] Range (min … max): 26.618 s … 35.105
Read the rest
s 10 runs It shows that as of this moment rav1d is (31.532 - 29.696)/29.696 * 100 = 6.2% slower to decode this Netflix test sequence. Note, this is an improvement from the (32.775 - 29.696)/29.696 * 100 = 10.4% when Prossimo posted a bounty for improving rav1d [1]: nathan@arm1:~/git/rav1d.old/target$ hyperfine --warmup 2 "release/dav1d -q -i ~/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps.ivf -o /dev/null --threads 8" Benchmark 1: release/dav1d -q -i ~/Chimera-AV1-8bit-1920x1080-6736kbps.ivf -o /dev/null --threads 8 Time (mean ± σ): 32.775 s ± 2.694 s [User: 254.120 s, System: 1.659 s] Range (min … max): 28.847 s … 37.606 s 10 runs None of this is particularly new, I reported this gap in performance over a year ago [2]. Here are some questions for HN: Even if rav1d closes the gap, who will ship rav1d over dav1d? More than 85% of dav1d is hand written assembly that rav1d takes as-is and calls via unsafe blocks. Is this really memory safety? The dav1d improvements must continuously be backported to rav1d, see the 82 closed PR's here [3]. Who is going to pay for this maintenance in perpetuity? VideoLAN fuzzes dav1d and fixes bugs extremely quickly, typically less than 24h. The rav1d developers are Rust experts, but not codec experts. Is it reasonable to expect the same support? [1] https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rav1d-perf-bounty/ [2] https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d/issues/804 [3] https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d/pulls?q=backport+is%3A...
In Improving performance of original dav1d video decoder
mmastrac·May 26, 2025
Rust allows for manual struct layout with #[repr(C)] (with some limits, but rav1d uses it heavily - https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amemorysafety%2Frav1d%20%2...), so some of this could likely be ported over to rav1d as well. I believe there's an occasional re-sync with the dav1d code, so it's entirely possible this ends up making both projects faster. You can see the struct the author of this PR modified here: https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d/blob/main/include/dav1... Interesting tool linked by the author: https://linux.die.net/man/1/pahole
In Improving performance of original dav1d video decoder

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