AV1 or AOMedia Video 1 is a new video coding format that can provide higher quality video with less bandwidth consumption. This codec is designed to provide video streaming over the internet.
AV1 is royalty free and open codec, which allows the codec to be supported and utilized by the entire industry. AV1 is developed by a non profit industry consortium known as Alliance for Open Media (AOM). Its governing members include Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Samsung, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft and others.
Codec is intended to be used by streaming services, web browsers, televisions, mobile devices. It is also more efficient than previously used video codecs. It provides better video quality than its predecessor. Furthermore, reduction in size allows faster transfer over the internet.
Perhaps the most important aspect of codec that set it apart from other codec is open and royalty free approach. Besides, with no licensing fees, individuals or companies or anyone can encode and decode videos without having to pay any royalty.
A majority of internet traffic is composed mainly of video content. With the introduction of 4K and 8K video content, it has become widely important that for a faster and high quality content. A new video codec like AV1 would not only provide high resolution videos but also a better compression to avoid high data usage.
Early adopters
Netflix has been an early adopter. It is using AV1 to provide video content. Its useful for both data saving customers and users who have smaller screen devices. That may only require video quality up to a certain resolution.
With new 4K and 8K televisions that are now coming in market. AV1 has huge potential to provide a high quality experience to the viewers. AV1 encoders and decoders are expected to be integrated in hardware devices in the future.
In the earlier version of AV1, encoding time were relatively higher. But, due to the nature of open source codec and community effort, encoding time have since reduced and has become quite practical.
AV1 codec decoding support is now available in Qualcomm and Samsung chips.
