- AV1 is a video codec that’s gaining traction among online streaming services because it’s free of royalties and delivers good video quality without needing a lot of bandwidth.
- However, many devices lack hardware accelerators for playing back videos encoded in AV1, which means they need to use a software decoder running on the CPU.
- Android currently ships with Google’s libgav1 AV1 software decoder, but a future update will switch that over to VideoLAN’s libdav1d, which offers significantly better performance.
Exactly seven years ago, YouTube shared a mind-boggling statistic with the world: people are watching a billion hours of content on the platform every single day. The digital media landscape has only grown since then thanks to the rise of TikTok and the ongoing online streaming war between Netflix and large media companies. With the sheer amount of video content these online services have to deliver on a daily basis, it’s imperative companies use the best compression technology available to save bandwidth without significantly compromising on quality. That’s why the Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 codec has been gaining traction among online streaming services.
AV1 is a video codec that offers superior compression efficiency compared to older codecs like h.264, h265, or VP9, which means that videos encoded in AV1 can deliver similar video quality at much lower bitrates. This reduces bandwidth requirements for both the streaming service and the end user without compromising on quality. Better performance isn’t the only reason why the streaming industry loves AV1, though. AV1 is also free of any royalties, which makes it an attractive option for streaming services that want to cut costs.
