Chips&Media licenses APV hardware IP to North American Big Tech

This agreement signals a critical shift in the professional mobile mezzanine codec market, which has been almost exclusively dominated by Apple’s ProRes. By securing a major North American partner beyond the existing Samsung-Qualcomm alliance, Chips&Media is helping establish APV as the de facto open-source standard for high-bandwidth video capture. This move decentralizes professional-grade video tools, allowing Android-based ecosystems and edge hardware to offer cinematic production features with better storage efficiency and native OS compatibility. Watch for the official integration of APV into the Android 16 media framework and upcoming third-party hardware releases from Japanese imaging firms.

The licensing of Chips&Media’s WAVE-P IP follows a series of industry maneuvers to standardize the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec as a royalty-free mezzanine format. Per Samsung and The Lec (July 2026), the unnamed North American partner is widely identified as Google, which intends to incorporate the technology into its Pixel smartphone roadmap. This follows the February 2026 launch of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, the first commercial device to feature native APV support via Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. According to SamMobile (January 2026), the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 provided the industry's first dedicated hardware acceleration for APV, enabling smartphones to handle the massive bitrates required for 8K video without the thermal overhead of software-based encoding.

APV’s expansion is bolstered by its recent formalization as IETF RFC 9924 in February 2026, a move that established its technical specifications for global use. Per Samsung-related reporting, the codec is approximately 10% to 20% more storage-efficient than Apple’s ProRes while maintaining comparable intra-frame-only quality essential for smooth frame-by-frame editing. To support the broader creative ecosystem, Blackmagic Design integrated APV support into DaVinci Resolve 20.2 in late 2025, and the open-source multimedia project FFmpeg added native encoding and decoding in early 2025 (per Medium, June 2025). Despite its rapid adoption, the standard faced early security scrutiny; in March 2026, Google patched CVE-2026-0006, a critical vulnerability in the libopenapv library that underscored the growing pains of integrating a new professional-grade media module into the Android framework.