AV1

AV1 stands for Alliance for Open Media Video 1. It is an open, royalty-free video coding format that was created by the Alliance for Open Media beginning in 2015. Development on its successor, AV2 is currently underway.

AV1, like most other video codecs, is used to compress a video file or stream to a lower bitrate (smaller file size) while preserving and maximizing the visual quality. In this regard, AV1 outperforms incumbent codecs HEVC and VP9 by roughly 30% and H264 by roughly 50%. AV1 is also extremely versatile and can be tuned to prioritize quality, speed, or a balance of the two. For instance, it can be configured for use in real-time communications, like in Google Hangouts, with a tradeoff of diminished quality. On the other end of the spectrum it can be used to create beautiful, cinematic 4K and 8K content, with a cost of longer encoding times.

Yes, when comparing equivalent bitrates, AV1 provides better visual quality than all of the other commonly used streaming codecs including HEVC, VP9 and H264. Looking at it from another angle, AV1 requires significantly lower bitrates than the other codecs to achieve equivalent visual quality.

AV1 can deliver equivalent quality to H265/HEVC at roughly 30% lower bitrates. AV1 is an open, royalty-free format, while HEVC is subject to licensing fees from multiple patent pools and independent patent holders. While neither has universal playback support, HEVC is the older and more mature codec, and currently has slightly broader support in the streaming ecosystem.

AV1 can deliver equivalent quality to VP9 at roughly 30% lower bitrates. Development work and the code base for VP10, the successor to VP9, were merged into the AV1 project after the Alliance for Open Media was formed, so in a sense AV1 is a newer generation or evolution of VP9.