Hardware video decoding on Asahi Linux Macs, 29 PRs in 21 hours

Chris Kearney@SiliconForested

🔥Omarchy Mac Users 🔥

The original maintainer didn’t want AI-generated contributions. Fair enough—we respected that boundary, forked the project, and got to work.

The result after roughly 21 hours:

• 29 PRs merged across two repos
• 115 new commits beyond the inherited baseline
• 7 PR authors contributing in parallel

We now have working Apple Video Decoder acceleration for H.264, HEVC and VP9 on M-series Macs running Asahi/Omarchy, plus opt-in H.264 High 10.

The work includes:

• Chrome’s solid-green-video bug fixed
• 10-bit HEVC blank-frame bug fixed
• HEVC tile and wavefront hangs fixed
• H.264 multi-slice firmware hangs fixed
• VP9 state, color-range and submission handling fixed
• Decoder lifecycle races and cross-context reference aliasing fixed
• Multiple memory-safety, error-handling and malformed-stream bugs fixed
• 15 AVD kernel patches
• Automatic installation, recovery and kernel-update rebuilding
• Sanitizer CI, guarded hardware testing and reproducible conformance infrastructure

On real M1 hardware we’re currently bit-exact on:

• HEVC: 144/147 streams
• AVC: 73/135
• VP9: 216/305
• 864 additional generated hardware-frame comparisons

Huge credit to the contributors: davefano, grudev, laihenyi, stefanakerwall, thebytorsnowdog and service-cyber—as well as the upstream and carried work from megi, sofus13, Igor Ryzhkov, Ante042, Aaron/aquarat and the Asahi Linux contributors.

This is what agent-native open-source development can look like: humans set direction and validate reality; agents attack a shared roadmap in parallel; every claim is tied to tests and hardware evidence.

We didn’t argue about whether AI belongs in open source.

We forked it and demonstrated what it can do.

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