Built in C/C++ with a Qt6/QML interface, AV is an independent fork of VLC and is distributed under GPLv2 (or later); the underlying engine is LGPLv2 (or later). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by VideoLAN.
- Local playback only — plays audio and video files from your own machine and nothing else. It does not stream, cast, serve, browse network shares, fetch metadata, or check for updates.
- Two interface layouts — Modern (client-side decoration, no menu bar, controls overlaid on the video) or Classic (native window decoration with a menu bar, controls pinned below the video).
- Custom theming — a custom colour palette set and a reworked type scale.
- Trimmed codec surface — the ffmpeg backend goes from upstream's 526 decoders down to roughly 112, covering every standard video, audio, and subtitle format while dropping legacy video-game cutscene codecs, GPU hardware-decode shims, dead VoIP codecs, and obsolete proprietary formats.
- Hardened build — full RELRO,
-z now, stack-clash protection, zero-initialized locals, and CET where supported, targetingx86-64-v3(Haswell, 2013, and newer).
The no-network guarantee is enforced twice over, in two independent layers.
| Layer | Detail |
|---|---|
| Build-time removal | Every module capable of opening a network socket is left out of the build: streaming inputs and outputs, device discovery, the addon manager, the updater, Lua scripting reachable from playlist files, and two modules upstream never gated behind a build flag at all. |
| Kernel confinement | The snap ships with strict confinement and does not request the network interface, so snapd denies network access in the kernel regardless of what the code does. |
| Reduced attack surface | Disc support (VCD/DVD/Blu-ray) and the codecs listed above are excluded from the build entirely, rather than merely disabled at runtime. |
| Toolchain hardening | Full RELRO, -z now, stack-clash protection, zero-initialized locals, and CET where the CPU supports it. |
sudo snap install audiovisualOr get it from the Snap Store.
The snap is strictly confined and targets core26. The store name is audiovisual because av is reserved; the application itself is AV everywhere it is user-visible.
A .deb is published on the Releases page.
Building uses the same meson/ninja pipeline as upstream VLC, through a project-specific configure wrapper:
./extras/av/configure-av.sh build
ninja -C build
DESTDIR=/path/to/stage ninja -C build installSet TMPDIR to somewhere executable if /tmp is mounted noexec on your system, since ffmpeg's configure needs to run test binaries during the contrib build.
To build the snap, on a host whose base matches core26:
snapcraft --destructive-modeLinux on x86-64 is the only supported platform, tested on Wayland.
GPLv2 (or later) for the application; LGPLv2.1 (or later) for the underlying engine. See COPYING and COPYING.LIB.
AV is an independent fork of VLC and is not affiliated with or endorsed by VideoLAN.