Academy Software Foundation adopts OpenAPV
Movie industry technical standards body the Academy Software Foundation has adopted OpenAPV as its latest hosted project.
The open-source codec for pro video production becomes the ASWF’s latest sandbox project, for technologies early in development, joining asset-management standard OpenAssetIO.
APV’s original creator, Samsung Electronics, becomes an ASWF Premier member, alongside Adobe, AMD, Autodesk, Epic Games, Intel, NVIDIA, and leading VFX and animation companies.
Developed to meet the needs of professional video production on mobile devices
An open-source implementation of Samsung’s APV codec, OpenAPV provides an open alternative to proprietary codecs like those of Apple’s ProRes and Avid’s DNxHR families
Launched last year, APV itself is intended to meet the needs of content creators who want access to professional-grade video editing and post-production tools on mobile devices.
It provides perceptually lossless encoding “close to raw video quality”, and video can be decoded and re-encoded multiple times without “severe” visual quality degradation.
The codec supports a high bit-rate range for 2K, 4K and 8K resolution content, 10- to 16-bit color depth, and common chroma sampling formats.
It’s also space-efficient: the ASWF’s blog post notes that it “consumes 20% less storage compared to existing formats”.
And since it uses technologies known to be over 20 years old, it’s royalty-free, removing another obstacle for software developers who want to support it in their applications.
One of over 100 open-source projects to which Samsung has contributed
OpenAPV is one of over 100 open-source projects to which Samsung has contributed.
“Samsung’s longstanding commitment to open source has been a model … in many industries, spanning both hardware and software development,” said ASWF Executive Director David Morin.
“We are very excited that Samsung Electronics has joined the Foundation and is contributing the APV source code [and] we hope that many developers will … participate in its development.”
Read the Academy Software Foundation’s announcement of its adoption of OpenAPV
Read more about OpenAPV in the project’s GitHub repository
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