oak-editor/README.new.md

Oak Video Editor

中文

Oak Video Editor is a free, open-source non-linear video editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This project is a community-maintained fork of Olive Video Editor.

NOTE: Oak Video Editor is alpha software and is considered highly unstable. We appreciate users testing it and sharing feedback, but please use it at your own risk.

Features

• Responsive timeline editing with smart disk/playback caching
• Node-based compositing and effects, including an OpenFX (OFX) plugin host
• Full color management (OpenColorIO): .cube/.3dl LUTs, configurable display/view/look transforms
• Scopes: waveform, vectorscope, histogram, and audio meters (LUFS/VU)
• Bézier keyframe animation with a curve editor
• Multicam editing and waveform-based audio sync
• Proxy media workflow for smooth 4K/8K editing
• Hardware-accelerated and batch export (H.264/H.265, image sequences, audio)
• Project crash recovery and autosave

Download

Pre-built binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux are on the Releases page.

Latest: v0.4.2-alpha

Architecture

Oak is split into small, independently testable components with a pure C ABI at the boundary:

Component	Kind	Purpose
liboakcore	shared library	Qt-free core types (rational, timecode, bezier, sample buffer, audio/video params) with a pure C ABI
liboakengine	shared library	the editing engine (node graph, timeline, render, codec, tasks), exposed only through the oakengine_* C ABI facade
oak-editor	application	the Qt GUI; talks to the engine only through the C ABI
oak-render-worker	process	headless render process that executes frames off the GUI thread (NDJSON IPC)
oak-cli	tool	command-line frontend for the engine: media info, probing, rendering, and transcoding without the GUI

The C ABI boundary is what makes the engine embeddable and is the foundation for a planned module-by-module rewrite of the engine in Rust (see docs/zh/plans/riir.md).

Command-Line Tools

oak-cli is a standalone, pure-C-ABI consumer of the engine:

oak-cli info <file>                    # media information
oak-cli probe <file>                   # stream/decoder probe
oak-cli render <project.ove> <out>     # render a project range
oak-cli transcode <in> <out>           # transcode media

Building from Source

See docs/build.md for full instructions (Windows/MSYS2, Linux Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch, and docs/build_macos.md for macOS). In short:

cmake -B build -G Ninja
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

Roadmap

Version	Theme	Core Deliverables
0.3	Plugin Architecture	Production-ready OpenFX host support — "any OFX plugin loads without crashing"
0.4	Color, Audio & Performance	.cube/.3dl, scopes, three-way color wheels, waveform auto-sync, BWF timecode sync, audio meters, proxy media, hardware-accelerated export, batch render queue
0.5	Animation, Tracking & Collaboration	Bézier keyframe curve editor, point tracking, image stabilizer, full multicam, OpenTimelineIO, EDL/XML interchange
0.6	Stability	Project file format freeze (backward compatibility), crash recovery, autosave, memory optimization
1.0	Production Ready	Complete documentation, installers, known-issues list, community support

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md first — it covers:

• the code style (naming rules, including PascalCase struct typedefs),
• the Google Test requirement for all tests,
• the C ABI boundary contract for engine-facing code.

Useful project docs: docs/zh/ (中文文档), docs/zh/facade-migration-roadmap.md, docs/zh/plans/riir.md.

License

Oak Video Editor is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.