UTV

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A Player for the Masses

UTV is a highly performant, lightweight, and modern image and sequence viewer.

Originally forked from visual effects industry software OpenRV, UTV is designed to be a distributable framecycler that anyone can install and run instantly. We have stripped away massive legacy build times and enterprise reference platform constraints to build a streamlined, cutting-edge tool for artists, editors, supervisors, and studios alike.

Initial Release: We Need Your Help

UTV is currently in its initial public release. While our modern build architecture and core playback engine are moving quickly, there will be issues, edge cases, and rough edges as we scale across diverse studio workflows, operating systems, and media formats.

We need the community's help to stress-test UTV and report what you find:

• What is broken or crashing
• Which codecs or formats fail to decode, display incorrect colors, or exhibit visual glitches
• Performance bottlenecks, frame drops, or playback stutter
• UX behaviors or tools that do not work as expected
• New features, integrations, or workflows you want to see

All bug reports and feature requests are tracked publicly via GitHub Issues. If you run into any issue or have an idea, please submit an issue with details about your operating system, hardware, and sample file specifications.

• Star this repository: If you find OpenUTV useful or believe in our mission of modern, lightning-fast media playback for everyone, please star this repository (top-right corner of the page)! Every star helps boost visibility on GitHub, attracts more contributors, and accelerates our release roadmap.

Why OpenUTV?

• Fast Build Times: A clean build from scratch on an M4 MacBook Air takes just 4:30 minutes; cached incremental rebuilds take under 50 seconds (compared to hours for legacy enterprise VFX builds).
• Lightweight & Redistributable: We prioritize a zero-config, portable distribution with an intelligent native trampoline launcher that guides missing dependencies instead of crashing.
• Always-Current Dependencies: All libraries (OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, OpenTimelineIO, Qt, FFmpeg, Imath, LibRaw, Boost, etc.) track the latest published releases from their respective upstream authors. You get modern features, performance boosts, and critical security patches immediately—without waiting for multi-year enterprise reference platform cycles.
• Community-Driven Velocity: OpenUTV is built for and by the creative community. We prioritize rapid review and merging of community pull requests, shipping updates with agility and momentum.

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

We want to express our sincere gratitude and deepest respect to the OpenRV team, Autodesk, and the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF).

The original RV engine is a triumph of engineering that has powered feature film and episodic visual effects for decades. We have the utmost respect for the OpenRV maintainers and the complex backwards-compatibility constraints under which enterprise pipelines operate.

OpenUTV is committed to being an active, positive part of the open-source visual effects ecosystem. We will continue to incorporate upstream fixes that OpenRV develops, and we actively hope the OpenRV project and the broader ASWF community benefit from our commits, performance improvements, and platform modernizations in return.

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Key Features & Capabilities

• Modern 10-Bit Color Pipeline: Native 10-bit Metal presentation on macOS (Extended Dynamic Range / EDR) and 10-bit Vulkan presentation on Linux & Windows, plus an integrated 10-bit diagnostic test pattern suite.
• Hardware-Accelerated Video: Native Apple Silicon VideoToolbox hardware decoding enabled by default for silky-smooth high-bitrate 4K/8K playback.
• Native Apple ProRes RAW: Out-of-the-box 16-bit half-float ProRes RAW decoding via AVFoundation and FFmpeg.
• Multi-Page PDF Document Viewing: Review storyboards, scripts, lookbooks, and contact sheets natively alongside video and sequence assets, complete with automatic margin auto-cropping.
• Professional Video I/O: Dynamic runtime support for NDI 6, Blackmagic Design DeckLink, and AJA Video Systems without licensing lock-in or bloated SDK dependencies.
• Comprehensive Format Support: OpenEXR (multi-part & deep), DPX, Cineon, TIFF, PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K), WebP, Targa, RAW camera files (CR2, NEF, ARW), and modern video containers.

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Feature Comparison: OpenUTV vs. Upstream OpenRV

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Installation

macOS (Homebrew Cask — Recommended)

Install the pre-compiled native macOS (Apple Silicon) binary directly from our custom Homebrew tap:

brew tap OpenUTV/utv https://github.com/OpenUTV/utv
brew trust OpenUTV/utv
brew install --cask utv

This automatically installs UTV.app along with all required multimedia dependencies (ffmpeg-full, qt, opencolorio, openimageio, openexr, etc.).

macOS (Standalone ZIP Release)

You can also download the standalone UTV-<version>-macOS-arm64.zip directly from our Releases page:

1. Unzip UTV.app and drag it to /Applications.
2. Launch UTV.app. Official releases are signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple with a stapled ticket, opening seamlessly on macOS.
3. Note for source / development builds: If you build UTV from source (which is ad-hoc signed by default), macOS Gatekeeper may prompt that the app was blocked. Open System Settings -> Privacy & Security, scroll down to the Security section, and click Open Anyway:

Alternatively, you can clear the quarantine attribute via Terminal:

xattr -cr /Applications/UTV.app

Windows (Standalone Release)

1. Install the Dependencies Package: Download and run the latest OpenUTVDeps-*-win64.msi installer from OpenUTV Dependencies Releases. This automatically installs all multimedia libraries (FFmpeg, Qt, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenImageIO, etc.) and registers them with your system PATH.
2. Download OpenUTV for Windows: Download the latest Windows release archive utv-windows-x64.zip from our Releases page.
3. Extract and Run: Extract the archive to a folder of your choice (e.g. C:\Program Files\OpenUTV or your user directory) and launch utv.exe (or UTV.bat).

Windows SmartScreen / Unsigned Executable Notice

When launching utv.exe for the first time, Windows Defender SmartScreen may display a warning ("Windows protected your PC – Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting"):

1. Click More info.
2. Click Run anyway.

[!NOTE] Why is the Windows binary unsigned? Microsoft requires an Extended Validation (EV) Code Signing Certificate or Azure Trusted Signing (~$10/month or several hundred dollars per year) to bypass SmartScreen warnings. As an independent open-source project, our binaries are 100% auditable, open-source, and built transparently on public GitHub Actions runners.

If an individual, studio, or corporate sponsor would like to fund a Windows code signing certificate for the project, please reach out via GitHub Discussions or sponsor us—we would be thrilled to set it up!

(Precompiled Linux .deb and .rpm packages are also available in our dependencies releases!)

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Building from Source

If you want to build UTV from source or contribute to the project, the process is straightforward:

1. Install Dependencies (macOS)

brew install ninja readline sqlite3 xz zlib tcl-tk@8 python-tk autoconf automake libtool python@3.14 yasm clang-format black meson nasm pkg-config glew ccache qt ffmpeg-full openexr imath opencolorio libraw libtiff libpng boost openimageio openjpeg webp yaml-cpp spdlog icu4c openjph jpeg-turbo

2. Build the Application

git clone --recursive https://github.com/OpenUTV/utv.git
cd utv
./build.sh --release --clean

The compiled binary bundle will be placed in _build/stage/app/UTV.app.

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Professional Video I/O

UTV dynamically supports professional video output using NDI, Blackmagic Design, and AJA Video Systems. Because we use dynamic runtime loading, UTV is completely unburdened by proprietary SDK restrictions.

If you have the appropriate drivers and runtimes installed on your machine, UTV will automatically detect them and enable the output features:

• NDI: Download and install the NDI Runtime from https://ndi.video/tools/ (or the NDI SDK macOS, Linux, Windows).
• Blackmagic Design: Download the "Desktop Video" driver from the Blackmagic Design Support Center.
• AJA Video Systems: Download the "Desktop Software" driver from the AJA Support Center.

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Cinema Camera RAW Support (Blackmagic RAW, RED R3D, ARRI)

OpenUTV provides native out-of-the-box support for a wide array of camera formats including Panasonic Lumix (.rw2), Sony RAW (.sr2), Hasselblad (.3fr), Phase One (.iiq), Samsung (.srw), Nikon (.nrw), Canon/Sony (.hif), and Apple ProRes RAW.

Native Runtime Loading (No Recompilation Required!)

Just like our NDI and DeckLink integrations, OpenUTV uses zero-overhead dynamic runtime loading for cinema camera formats so that users and studios can enable playback without rebuilding OpenUTV:

• Blackmagic RAW (.braw): Simply install the free Blackmagic RAW Player or DaVinci Resolve. OpenUTV automatically discovers the installed runtime framework and enables full hardware and multithreaded CPU debayering with full camera metadata.
• RED Digital Cinema (.r3d): OpenUTV includes the native mio_r3d plugin supporting IPP2 color science, custom resolutions (Full, Half, Quarter), and multi-channel 16-bit float/integer decoding. OpenUTV automatically discovers the RED dynamic libraries if RED SDK or REDCINE-X PRO is installed, or via the RED_SDK_PATH environment variable.
• ARRIRAW & ARRI MXF (.ari, .arx, .mxf): Supported natively via OpenUTV's built-in decoding pipeline with automatic detection of ARRI LogC / ALEXA Wide Gamut color spaces and primaries.

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FFmpeg & Codec Architecture

UTV dynamically links to FFmpeg at runtime to provide broad playback support across professional multimedia formats without licensing or redistribution restrictions. Because UTV resolves FFmpeg dynamically, updating or replacing your local FFmpeg installation directly enables hardware encoding/decoding and extended codec support without recompiling UTV:

• macOS: UTV leverages Homebrew's ffmpeg-full formula, automatically installed when using brew install --cask utv. This provides extensive codec support (H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1, ProRes, DNxHD, etc.) without requiring custom compilation. In addition, Apple Silicon Macs benefit from native VideoToolbox hardware decoding and native AVFoundation ProRes RAW decoding out of the box.
• Windows: The default distribution discovers FFmpeg DLLs via your system PATH or directly alongside UTV.exe.

Fully Loaded FFmpeg on Windows (Hardware Acceleration & Custom Codecs)

For Windows environments requiring full hardware acceleration (NVIDIA NVDEC/NVENC, Intel QSV, AMD AMF) and non-free codecs (such as FDK-AAC, x264, x265, and DeckLink I/O), you can supply a fully loaded FFmpeg build using either approach below:

Option A: Pre-Built Shared Build

1. Download a pre-compiled shared release (e.g., ffmpeg-release-full-shared.7z from Gyan.dev or BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds).
2. Extract the archive and copy the .dll files from the bin/ directory directly into the folder where UTV.exe is installed (or add the bin/ directory to your system PATH).

Option B: Compile via vcpkg

If you have Visual Studio Build Tools and vcpkg installed, you can compile a full-featured shared build with custom hardware modules:

vcpkg install ffmpeg[nvcodec,qsv,amf,decklink,fdk-aac,x264,x265]:x64-windows

Once complete, copy the .dll files from vcpkg/packages/ffmpeg_x64-windows/bin directly into your UTV installation directory.

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Support OpenUTV

OpenUTV is completely free and open-source. If you use UTV in your studio pipeline or freelance workflows and want to support its ongoing development, you can help fund the project:

• GitHub Sponsors (Monthly or one-time)
• Support on Patreon
• Donate via Stripe (Credit Card / Apple Pay)

Cryptocurrency Addresses (BTC / ETH / SOL)

Bitcoin (BTC)	Ethereum (ETH)	Solana (SOL)

• BTC: bc1qwpd4nmz409xx3x5n9z76avnv7rqucu8w53aejy
• ETH: 0xB9Ab3823a967804EdE427541F36E785912b67f98
• SOL: 9EdidyxKi9rwx35yvi5FVr7bDkFMPUUKMhFCdp4ASNG7

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Contributing & Governance

We welcome community contributions! Please read our CONTRIBUTING.md and GOVERNANCE.md to get started.

Star History

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About Third-Party Licenses

See THIRD-PARTY.md for license information about portions of UTV that have been imported from other projects.