VideoLAN ships Dav2d, an AV2 decoder — but Anubis blocks the repo

VideoLAN has published Dav2d on its self-hosted GitLab, signalling early work on an AV2 video decoder following the same lineage as Dav1d, the project’s widely adopted AV1 decoder. The repository sits at code.videolan.org rather than a mainstream forge, which is consistent with VideoLAN’s long-running preference for controlling its own infrastructure.

The page itself is currently gated by Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge VideoLAN’s admins have deployed to fend off aggressive AI scraping traffic that has been knocking smaller open-source forges offline. The challenge runs in the browser using Hashcash-style PoW, trivial for a human visitor but expensive at crawler scale. Anubis is explicitly framed as a stopgap until headless-browser fingerprinting matures enough to skip the interstitial for likely-human traffic.

The net effect: actual code, README, and commit history for Dav2d aren’t reachable from the fetched response, only the anti-scraper shim. Confirmation of features, license, or AV2 spec coverage requires loading the repo in a real browser.