It would be great if AV1 was as ubiquitous as H.264. Apple is very much holding things back by insisting that Safari only support AV1 on devices with hardware decoding (M3 and higher), even though other browsers use software decoding just fine.
(Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)
twotwotwo 19 minutes ago [-]
The tech was surely locked down long ago if they're close to announcing, but just putting the dream out there that AV2 makes next-gen image compression more practical. AVIF's very effective at maintaining OK quality at low bitrates, but encoding at high quality on CPU (something like the common ~2bpp JPEG) was very slow. I think that slowed down adoption and was one of the reasons JXL still had a niche. Progressive mode would help for images too.
Another great thing JXL has is lossless recompression of .jpg files, which is a smaller improvement than a whole new format, but much easier to deploy. Saving 22% beats saving 0%. Harder, of course, to see how that one would connect to any of AOMedia's other priorities.
dylan604 1 hours ago [-]
"AV1 adoption is accelerating"
But before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild
With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?
free_bip 1 hours ago [-]
I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think I can at least sort of understand why they're going with this speed of release cadence. If the release cadence is too slow, you might end up with another JPEG situation where the new codec is undeniably better in every way, but nobody wants to implement it since the old standard was around for so long without any competition.
dylan604 59 minutes ago [-]
If you're going to do that, then the new thing must be so much better than the old thing that makes the pain of switching to the new thing worth while.
By the time h.265 encoding was trying to gain traction, h.264 encoding speeds were very fast. The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes. For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that. The switch from MPEG-2 to h.264 had very noticeable quality improvements so it did make it worth while for the slower encodes until h.264 was locked and key code included in CPUs. It was similar to the adoption rates of DVD from VHS compared to Blu-ray from DVD.
mirashii 12 minutes ago [-]
> For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that.
The average user is a consumer of media, not doing encoding themselves. A one time cost for higher encoding to save bandwidth / storage space many times over is almost always going to make some amount of sense.
The real issue here is just a standard chicken-and-egg problem. To use a new codec, you need it to be supported in end user devices. To get it to be supported, you need to show demand... for a thing that nobody can use yet.
cubefox 44 minutes ago [-]
> The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes.
That's a contradiction because quality improvement and file size improvement are just two sides of the same coin. You can't have a large quality improvement at the same bit rate without having a large file size reduction at the same quality.
kevincox 31 minutes ago [-]
h266 (aka VVC) is seemingly late in development. They probably want to ensure that people are aware that it will be matched so that they don't commit to it and AV2 ends up a bit late to the party like AV1 is compared to h265 where it had a notable compatibility lead.
If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h266 and wait for the open alternative to ship.
cogman10 10 minutes ago [-]
AV1 competes with h266. They were released near the same date. In many ways h266 has already lost the battle as nobody supports it even though it's been around just as long as AV1.
h267 is still in development and due to be released in 2028. That's the actual competitor with AV2.
craftkiller 1 hours ago [-]
I do. I watch scifi shows over the internet with my friends. We watch it together on a web page with an html5 video element served out of my apartment. I've had to re-encode it to 3 megabits per second (to avoid stutter/buffering) with no b-frames. When initially setting it up, I tested both H264 and AV1 at that bitrate and H264 looked considerably worse. No surprise there, considering H264 is old enough to drink (22 years) whereas AV1 is only 7 years old.
jl6 2 hours ago [-]
Is this intended to be competitive with h.266/VVC? And is it?
throw0101d 38 minutes ago [-]
> Is this intended to be competitive with h.266/VVC? And is it?
Yes:
> VVC is not alone in the video coding race. AV1, backed by AOMedia, has already gained traction, although its performance does not make it a direct competitor to VVC in high-end applications. The upcoming AV2, as well as AI-driven encoding techniques, could pose challenges to VVC’s success. Nevertheless, VVC’s strong technical foundation, industry support, and clear intellectual property structure position it as a promising long-term solution for video coding.
> For businesses focused on reducing operational costs, this is a key point in the h.266 vs av1 debate. While the H.266/VVC codec offers powerful compression improvements over h.265, AV1—and eventually AV2—may be more attractive thanks to simpler licensing and long-term affordability.
Anyone use AV1? How good is it? What are your thoughts on AV2?
6SixTy 56 minutes ago [-]
AV1 is really one of those things born out of internet providers (e.g. Google, Amazon) put together so they can deliver content more efficiently with their bandwidth without needing to deal with a complicated web of royalties in addition to paying said royalties. There's plenty of people using AV1 or it's image format but don't realize it.
Also, video encoding pretty much always comes with the tradeoff of more efficient = uses more processing power
catskull 43 minutes ago [-]
I did some testing with the 3 main AV1 encoders with gifs (avif). They’re pretty good. But not as good as jpeg xl but currently basically only Safari supports it.
For most “normie” use cases, I’d recommend cloudflares image transforms which are available on free tier. I actually wrote a small Jekyll plugin for my site to auto prefix images with their transform. Idk why but shipping optimized images is just one of those things that tickles me!
I implemented an encoding pipeline for AV1 for vids uploaded to my social news site (think reddit competitor except I'm extremely small fry). I eventually removed the code for it.
While the space savings and quality improvements are good, the encoding speed is an order of magnitude slower than using h264/vp9. In the end the user experience of causing people to wait significantly longer for an AV1 encode wasn't worth the tradeoff. To fix the user experience problem, I still had to encode a h264 version anyway, which kinda defeats the point when it comes to space savings. You still get data transfer improvements, but the break even point for when the encoding costs offset the data transfer costs were around 1000 views per min of video encoded, and as an average I'm far below that.
IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.
Worth keeping in mind I was looking at this ~2 years ago, so things may have evolved since then.
DiogenesKynikos 13 minutes ago [-]
Things have gotten a lot better. You were probably using the reference encoder, but there's a newer, much faster encoder: svt-av1.
Caspy7 1 hours ago [-]
Lots of people are using AV1. They just don't know it.
prism56 44 minutes ago [-]
I manually turn AV1 off on my android phone. It uses more battery and won't sustain 1440p at 1.5x speed up without the odd frameskip.
cbg0 53 minutes ago [-]
Netflix streams in AV1 to devices that support it.
Velocifyer 32 minutes ago [-]
I use AV1, it is very efficent
Thaxll 1 hours ago [-]
Encoder are extremely slow.
lern_too_spel 36 minutes ago [-]
SVT-AV1 is the fastest software encoder for pretty much any level of quality you would want.
(Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)
Another great thing JXL has is lossless recompression of .jpg files, which is a smaller improvement than a whole new format, but much easier to deploy. Saving 22% beats saving 0%. Harder, of course, to see how that one would connect to any of AOMedia's other priorities.
But before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild
With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?
By the time h.265 encoding was trying to gain traction, h.264 encoding speeds were very fast. The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes. For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that. The switch from MPEG-2 to h.264 had very noticeable quality improvements so it did make it worth while for the slower encodes until h.264 was locked and key code included in CPUs. It was similar to the adoption rates of DVD from VHS compared to Blu-ray from DVD.
The average user is a consumer of media, not doing encoding themselves. A one time cost for higher encoding to save bandwidth / storage space many times over is almost always going to make some amount of sense.
The real issue here is just a standard chicken-and-egg problem. To use a new codec, you need it to be supported in end user devices. To get it to be supported, you need to show demand... for a thing that nobody can use yet.
That's a contradiction because quality improvement and file size improvement are just two sides of the same coin. You can't have a large quality improvement at the same bit rate without having a large file size reduction at the same quality.
If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h266 and wait for the open alternative to ship.
h267 is still in development and due to be released in 2028. That's the actual competitor with AV2.
Yes:
> VVC is not alone in the video coding race. AV1, backed by AOMedia, has already gained traction, although its performance does not make it a direct competitor to VVC in high-end applications. The upcoming AV2, as well as AI-driven encoding techniques, could pose challenges to VVC’s success. Nevertheless, VVC’s strong technical foundation, industry support, and clear intellectual property structure position it as a promising long-term solution for video coding.
* https://www.nokia.com/blog/the-future-of-video-compression-i...
> For businesses focused on reducing operational costs, this is a key point in the h.266 vs av1 debate. While the H.266/VVC codec offers powerful compression improvements over h.265, AV1—and eventually AV2—may be more attractive thanks to simpler licensing and long-term affordability.
* https://www.dacast.com/blog/h266-vvc-versatile-video-coding/
Not qualified to answer.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware_encoding_and_deco...
~~And iPhones and Macs since the A15 / M3 chips~~
Also, video encoding pretty much always comes with the tradeoff of more efficient = uses more processing power
See my blog: https://catskull.net/libaom-vs-svtav1-vs-rav1e-2025.html
For most “normie” use cases, I’d recommend cloudflares image transforms which are available on free tier. I actually wrote a small Jekyll plugin for my site to auto prefix images with their transform. Idk why but shipping optimized images is just one of those things that tickles me!
https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/transform-images/
While the space savings and quality improvements are good, the encoding speed is an order of magnitude slower than using h264/vp9. In the end the user experience of causing people to wait significantly longer for an AV1 encode wasn't worth the tradeoff. To fix the user experience problem, I still had to encode a h264 version anyway, which kinda defeats the point when it comes to space savings. You still get data transfer improvements, but the break even point for when the encoding costs offset the data transfer costs were around 1000 views per min of video encoded, and as an average I'm far below that.
IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.
Worth keeping in mind I was looking at this ~2 years ago, so things may have evolved since then.
https://engineering.fb.com/2023/02/21/video-engineering/av1-...