Amol Kelkar

Introducing Aval - a new open source format for interactive video on the web. It has a built-in state machine, frame accurate transitions, and packed alpha transparency. This is probably the craziest thing I’ve ever built with Codex. I’d been dreaming about this technology for years. Before AI, building it would have taken months of work. I could never justify that investment for a noncommercial open source project. Then, a little over a year ago, Airbnb created Lava for almost exactly the same purpose. That gave me hope. But Lava was never released as open source. So I decided to build my own, with AI. Aval comes with a compiler and a web renderer. Together, they give you: • a deterministic state graph - named states, authored triggers, and routing where the latest trigger wins. • frame accurate routes with transitions that begin on authored content frames using portals, finishes, cuts, and reversals. • small file size and low CPU overhead, perfect for small icons designed and animated in Blender. • seekless loops so the decoder timeline keeps moving forward across loop seams instead of seeking. • packed alpha transparency. transparent prerendered motion composited with WebGL2. • a web native runtime: decoding with WebCodecs and rendering with WebGL2. • progressive fallback: Host-owned fallback markup remains available for unsupported and reduced motion contexts. Now it exists, it’s open source, and it’s available today as a technical preview. I’ll be polishing it further over the next few days.