Alliance for Open Media
Hardware and software support for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has been steadily growing in recent years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding is becoming standard in more GPUs, phone SoCs, and other hardware, while streaming video services like YouTube and Netflix have started offering AV1-encoded video to devices that support it.
Open-source software projects are also starting to follow suit. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) suite has expanded its AV1 capabilities in recent releases, and now the Handbrake video transcoding app has also added AV1 support. Version 1.6.0, released yesterday, added support for encoding AV1 video using both CPU-based SVT-AV1 software encoding and through Intel’s AV1-compatible QuickSync video encoder included in the Arc GPUs .
The latest RTX 4000 and RX 7000 series GPUs from Nvidia and AMD also include hardware encoding support for AV1, but the software required to use it is not yet built into Handbrake.
AV1 is an open-source video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that includes big names like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, and Microsoft. Like the H.265/HEVC codec, AV1 enables much more efficient video compression than the legacy H.264 codec, allowing 4K and HDR video to be streamed without requiring a massive increase in bandwidth over 1080p -video. Unlike HEVC, support for the AV1 codec can be added to just about anything without paying royalties.
The main advantage of HEVC over AV1 at the moment is that it enjoys much wider support than AV1 in many generations of hardware from most major manufacturers. Roku supports AV1 decoding in some of its high-end streaming devices, but reportedly pushed back against Google when the company tried to force Roku to support AV1 decoding across its entire lineup. Apple’s AV1 plans are also shady – the company is a member of the AOMedia group, and some rudimentary AV1 support has recently appeared in the developer documentation, but hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding and encoding isn’t supported or enabled in its latest Apple Silicon chips.
