rav2d: Memory-safe AV2 decoder in Rust (port of dav2d)

[stukenov]

Sharing a project relevant to the AV2 ecosystem: rav2d — a complete Rust port of dav2d (the production AV2 decoder).

All C decoder logic (47K+ lines) has been rewritten in safe Rust. Assembly DSP kernels remain via FFI for performance. 786 tests passing.

The motivation is memory safety — video decoders parse untrusted bitstreams and are historically prone to buffer overflows and use-after-free. rav2d eliminates these bug classes at compile time.

Follows the same approach as rav1d (Rust port of dav1d for AV1, funded by Prossimo/ISRG).

Full pipeline ported: OBU parsing, MSAC entropy decoding, block decode (intra/inter/compound), deblock, CDEF, loop restoration (NS/PC Wiener, GDF), film grain, motion compensation, inverse transforms, threading.

BSD 2-Clause license (same as dav2d).

[urvangjoshi]

@stukenov : Thanks for sharing!

We noticed that main.rs currently seems to exit immediately? https://github.com/stukenov/rav2d/blob/main/crates/rav2d-cli/src/main.rs

Is the decoder CLI WIP?

[stukenov]

Thanks for checking.

Yes, the CLI is still WIP. I focused first on porting and validating the core decoder logic, so main.rs is currently only a placeholder and exits immediately.

The decoder pipeline itself has been ported and is covered by the existing tests. I will finish the rav2d-cli wiring next so it can actually accept input files and run decoding from the command line.

[urvangjoshi]

Understood, thank you!