What is the AV1 Codec?
AV1 is an open, royalty-free, next-generation video coding format from the Alliance of Open Media Video. It is designed to replace Google’s VP9 and compete with H.265/HEVC. AV1 is targeting an expected improvement of about 30% over VP9/HEVC with only reasonable increases in encoding and playback complexity.
- Interoperable and open
- Designed with a low computational footprint and optimized for hardware
- Capable of consistent, highest-quality, real-time video delivery
- Optimized for the Internet
- Scalable to any modern device at any bandwidth
- Flexible for both commercial and non-commercial content, including user-generated content.
The AV1 development team
In September 2015 the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) was founded by leading companies from various industries with an association to media technology. Among them are browser vendors like Google, Mozilla and Microsoft, hardware vendors like AMD, ARM, Intel, and NVIDIA, and content providers like Amazon and Netflix.
AV1 Playback in Firefox
Bitmovin and Mozilla, both members of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), are partnering to bring AV1 playback with HTML5 to Firefox as the first browser to play AV1 MPEG-DASH/HLS streams (get Firefox). While the AV1 bitstream is still being finalized, the industry is gearing for fast adoption of the new codec, which promises to be approximately 30% more efficient than VP9 and H.265/HEVC.
AV1 quality comparison
AV1 delivers superior quality at significantly lower bitrates when compared to HEVC, VP9 and H.264. Our tests and evaluations have show that AV1 outperforms all the other codecs when encoded with the same bitrate settings.
