After many months of design and development the new much improved version of the Astronomical Digital Video (ADV) file format has been released. Here are the highlights:
The first version of the format was developed as part of the Astronomical Digital Video System (ADVS). The format was then extended for analogue video in the form of Astro Analogue Video (AAV) as currently supported by OccuRec for recording and Tangra 3 for processing.
A free and open source C and C# version of the AdvLib library that supports reading and writing into the format has been available since 2013. This library is used by third party software to offer recording in ADV format.
In 2014 a working group including software authors working with astronomical video as well as prominent amateur and professional astronomers was formed to work on a new - improved version of the format. Among the issues to be solved were ability for using UTC timestamp with a resolution of a nanosecond, very high frame rates with a resolution up to a picosecond, support for multiple streams of video and included open source libraries with cross-platform support.
In the end of 2019 additional improvement were made to the format, adding ROI-Only image layout. ADV support was further added to more video recorders and data reduction software.