libaom

libaom is the reference implementation of the AV1 video coding format, developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). It provides a complete encoder and decoder for AV1 bitstreams and serves as the baseline for testing, benchmarking, and validating conformance with the AV1 specification.

The project includes the aomenc encoder and aomdec decoder, along with a C API suitable for embedding in applications. It is written primarily in C, with optimizations and SIMD paths for modern CPUs, and supports multi-threaded operation to leverage parallel encoding and decoding.

libaom is cross-platform and widely used in open-source projects and commercial software. It forms the basis for AV1 support in media pipelines, media players, and web browsers, and is commonly integrated with tools such as FFmpeg and GStreamer. Development is open to contributions from member organizations of AOMedia as well as independent developers, with ongoing work to improve performance, feature support, and conformance.

See also: AV1, Alliance for Open Media. The project is hosted in a public repository that provides source code, release binaries, and documentation to facilitate integration and testing of AV1 in various environments.