“AV1 video codec is gaining significant market share at the expense of hevc”

The AV1 video codec from the Alliance for Open Media is gaining ground compared to high efficiency video coding or HEVC, also referred to as h265. This was reported by a video researcher during a discussion at the International Broadcasting Convention.

Krishna Rapaka, a video researcher at Twitch and Amazon, says that ‘AV1 is gaining ground over hevc and taking a lot of market share from h265’, writes FlatpanelsHD. He reports, based on anecdotal evidence, that AV1 adoption is growing at a rate of 30 to 40 percent per year. According to him, this growth is ‘quite fast’.

The researcher does add that growth is currently mainly driven by software implementations. He says that hardware support is very important for services like Twitch. AV1 is already used by Netflix and YouTube, and hardware-wise, quite a few new smart TVs have built-in support. This also applies, for example, to smartphones with, among other things, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 soc; this is Qualcomm’s first Snapdragon soc to support the AV1 codec. In addition, Intel, AMD and Nvidia have also pledged support.

Once hardware support becomes more mainstream, codec adoption is likely to accelerate even further. It’s a potential hitch EU study on licensing policy and so far Apple has not made any concrete plans to support AV1, even though the Cupertino company is a member of the organization behind AV1.

AV1, or AOMedia Video 1, is a video compression codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. This includes Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, LG, Microsoft and Samsung. The codec is seen as the successor to Google’s VP9. AV1 is a codec that was actually created as a response to the licensing chaos that hevc has to deal with. AV1 also has to perform a lot better than VP9 or HEVC, which means in concrete terms that, for example, the same video quality is possible at lower bit rates.