Omarchy Mac Fork Adds Asahi Hardware Video Decoding Through Agent-Native Open-Source Work

Summary

A community fork of the Omarchy Mac project reports a rapid round of agent-assisted open-source development after the original maintainer declined AI-generated contributions. In roughly 21 hours, contributors merged 29 pull requests across two repositories, added 115 commits beyond the inherited baseline, and worked with seven PR authors in parallel. The resulting work provides Apple Video Decoder acceleration for H.264, HEVC, and VP9 on M-series Macs running Asahi/Omarchy, with optional H.264 High 10 support. The contributors say they fixed Chrome’s solid-green-video issue, blank HEVC frames, HEVC tile and wavefront hangs, H.264 multi-slice firmware hangs, VP9 state and color-range handling, decoder lifecycle races, cross-context reference aliasing, and several memory-safety and malformed-stream bugs. The project also includes 15 AVD kernel patches, automated installation and recovery, kernel-update rebuilding, sanitizer CI, guarded hardware testing, and reproducible conformance infrastructure. On real M1 hardware, the team reports bit-exact results for 144 of 147 HEVC streams, 73 of 135 AVC streams, and 216 of 305 VP9 streams, plus 864 additional generated hardware-frame comparisons. The post presents the effort as an example of humans setting direction and validating results while agents work in parallel against a shared roadmap.