Glossary
AV1
A royalty-free video codec from the Alliance for Open Media. ~30% more efficient than H.265/HEVC at the same quality. Hardware-decoded on most 2022+ devices; encoding still GPU-accelerated rather than universal.
AV1 was designed to succeed both VP9 (open) and H.265/HEVC (royalty-encumbered). Its compression ratio is meaningfully better at the same visual quality — the cost is encoder complexity.
Where it's deployed
- YouTube, Twitch, Netflix — increasingly default for 4K+ tiers.
- Hardware decode — RTX 30+, RX 6000+, Arc, Apple M3+, recent phones.
- Hardware encode — RTX 40+, Arc, Ryzen 7000-series APUs.
Streaming impact
AV1 lets 4K HDR fit comfortably in 8 Mbps where HEVC needed 15 Mbps. The bandwidth saving lets services either reach more viewers at the same quality or improve quality at the same bandwidth.
File workflow
For local archive, AV1 saves 25–40% storage vs HEVC at the same quality — at the cost of long encode times unless you have hardware encode.
Where this matters
Categories that use av1
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