edge264

edge264 is an H.264/AVC cross-platform open-source decoder, focused on speed and ease-of-use.

It grew up as a research effort on new software engineering practices, most notably the use of C vector extensions to replace hand-crafted assembly. As such it is slowly but steadily progressing towards production-readiness, with a target 1.0 release and API-freeze on 29 January 2027 (see the roadmap).

Single-threaded benchmark computed by a median of 5 runs of Big Buck Bunny test video, on GitHub-hosted runners with the latest OpenH264 and LibAVC and Ubuntu’s FFmpeg (see benchmarks.yml).

Features

edge264 supports Progressive High and MVC 3D profiles, up to level 6.2. Until the 2026-11-20 milestone of the roadmap, streams using constrained intra prediction or a pic_parameter_set_id above 3 are reported as unsupported.

Below is an overview of optional features versus Baseline (BP), Extended (XP), Main (MP), High (HP) and Stereo High…