AV1

AV1, or AOMedia Video 1, is an open, royalty-free video coding format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). The project was created to enable high-quality video streaming over the internet without proprietary licensing, and to compete with HEVC and other codecs. Development began in the mid-2010s and the specification was released in 2018, with libaom as the official reference implementation. AOMedia includes members such as Google, Mozilla, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, ARM, and others.

AV1 is capable of delivering high compression efficiency across a range of resolutions, from sub-SD up to 8K, with support for HDR, wide color gamut, and 4:4:4 chroma, as well as screen content coding for text and graphics. It uses advanced tools for intra- and inter-frame prediction, larger transform blocks, improved entropy coding, and loop filtering, along with features like film grain synthesis and tile-based parallelization for better scalability.

Adoption and impact: AV1 is supported in major web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others) and is increasingly used by streaming services, content delivery networks, and video conferencing. Hardware support is expanding, with several recent GPUs and mobile platforms providing hardware-accelerated AV1 decode and, in some cases, encode, helping to reduce power consumption and latency.

Licensing and status: AV1 is designed to be royalty-free and openly licensed, avoiding licensing fees for encoder and decoder implementations. Ongoing development continues within the alliance and external contributors, with ongoing optimizations and tooling improvements.