Samsung on professionalising mobile video
Samsung published commentary explaining how its APV approach elevates mobile video toward professional standards for capture and delivery. The piece frames APV as a vendor effort to set higher technical expectations for mobile video workflows. (x.com)
A video codec is the file format engine behind recording and editing, and Samsung said on April 15 that its Advanced Professional Video system is meant to push phone video closer to pro workflows. (news.samsung.com) Samsung’s editorial said Advanced Professional Video, or APV, is an open-source codec the company developed for recording, post-production and delivery, with support for professional-grade YUV422 color reproduction. Samsung’s developer documentation describes it as “visually lossless,” meaning repeated edits are designed to keep image damage hard to see. (news.samsung.com) (developer.samsung.com) In plain terms, APV is trying to solve a familiar phone-video problem: footage can look sharp at capture, then lose flexibility once creators start color grading, reframing or exporting multiple times. Samsung said APV was built to preserve more detail through those steps while using compression efficient enough for mobile devices. (news.samsung.com) (developer.samsung.com) The push comes as APV is moving beyond Samsung’s own marketing pages. Android 16 added platform support for the codec, calling it a high-bitrate intra-frame format aimed at top-quality capture and editing, and the Internet Engineering Task Force published APV as RFC 9924 in February 2026. (source.android.com) (datatracker.ietf.org) That standardization has limits. RFC 9924 says APV was published for informational purposes and is “not” an Internet Standards Track specification, so the document records the format but does not make it a formal consensus standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force. (datatracker.ietf.org) Samsung has already tied the format to hardware. The Galaxy S26 Ultra, launched in March 2026, is the first Galaxy phone with APV support, and Samsung said users can record up to 8K at 30 frames per second, choose 422 HQ or 422 LQ options, and save directly to external USB storage. (samsungmobilepress.com) Samsung also said APV uses about 10% less storage than “other formats” on the Galaxy S26 Ultra page, while earlier coverage of the codec cited a 20% figure from Samsung claims. The company’s April 15 editorial did not repeat either number, leaving the exact comparison dependent on which workload and benchmark are being used. (samsungmobilepress.com) (sammobile.com) Editing support is starting to show up in tools creators already use. Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 20 codec list includes APV, and Google’s Android source tree includes libopenapv, which describes the codec as focused on professional recording and editing workflows. (documents.blackmagicdesign.com) (android.googlesource.com) Samsung’s argument is that phone cameras no longer need only better lenses or sensors; they also need file formats that survive editing like pro camera footage does. Whether APV becomes a real cross-industry format will depend less on Samsung’s commentary than on how widely Android device makers, editing apps and creators adopt it over 2026. (news.samsung.com) (source.android.com)
