Opening Files

Drag and Drop

Drag any .riv file onto the RAV window to load it. The animation begins playing immediately using the default playback target.

File Dialog

Click the OPEN button in the toolbar to browse your filesystem and select a .riv file.

Double-Click (Desktop)

On macOS, RAV seeds the known Rive content identifiers and dynamically discover every registered UTI tagged with the .riv extension. The app also declares an extension-level alternate Viewer entry backed by the dedicatedRiveFileIcon.icns. RAV does not silently replace your chosen default app during installation. To choose it deliberately, open Settings and useMAKE DEFAULT beside Default .riv App. That one action asks macOS to assign the effective .riv association to RAV, regardless of how many compatible identifiers are currently registered. The discovered identifier set remains internal diagnostic data and is never presented as a click-through task. After macOS confirms the association, Settings shows RAV DEFAULT and offersREPAIR ICON to re-register the installed app's document metadata. If RAV is running, a double-clicked file is queued into the existing window and replaces playback after the new surface is ready.

RAV listens for the operating system's native open-file event rather than polling for queued files. If that listener cannot be registered, files queued by Finder or another app are reconciled and loaded automatically the next time RAV starts.

On the first launch after an app update, RAV refreshes the installed bundle's Launch Services registration once for the version and schema, without restarting Finder or changing the Viewer/Alternate rank. The declarations include the dedicated document icon resource, known compatibility identifiers, and the extension-level fallback for identifiers introduced by other apps. Finder can repaint a cached document icon later than the registration itself; this setting does not install or repair a separate Quick Look preview provider.

On Windows, both the NSIS setup executable and MSI package install a dedicated ten-resolution RiveFileIcon.ico for .riv documents. The NSIS updater rewrites the document-icon registration and notifies Explorer on every update; uninstall restores the association that existed before RAV. MSI owns the equivalent registry value as an upgrade-aware component and removes it on uninstall. Right-click a.riv file and choose "Open with" if you want RAV to be its active handler.

Supported Formats

RAV supports Rive runtime files (.riv). These are the compiled binary output from the Rive Editor. Source .rev project files cannot be opened directly.