Both Google and Mozilla recently added support for AV1 video decoding to the developmental versions of their respective browsers. While there is no word yet on when it will make its way to the release builds of Chrome and Firefox, it is expected that it won’t be long.
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The addition of AV1 video support to Chrome and Firefox is not particularly surprising considering Google and Mozilla are both part of the Alliance for Open Media consortium that developed the format. Other notable names that are part of the consortium include Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix.
From the time it was announced in 2015, AV1 was developed as an open-source and royalty-free format to replace HEVC. It was officially released in April 2018, and since then Netflix, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have revealed plants to utilize the format for video streaming.
Compared to HEVC, AV1 is able to provide better compression rates and will cut the file size of videos by anything from 25% to 35%. It is also designed to scale, and will be able to support 8K video resolutions or higher if need be.
The downside of AV1 compared to HEVC is that it requires significantly more hardware power to encode and decode videos. As of now there are no converters to verify the claims of the format’s effectiveness, whereas HEVC has more widespread support such as from Movavi Video Converter (http://www.movavi.com/videoconverter/) for example.
With Chrome and Firefox both introducing support for AV1 however, format will official enter Phase 2 of its adoption roadmap. It is expected that in 2019 AV1 will start to be supported by hardware and content will be rolled out in the format, while by 2020 it will be fully adopted by modern devices.
Although there are still questions being asked of AV1 and whether or not it will be able to topple HEVC, most experts are positive about its chances. The fact that it is backed by so many tech giants puts it on a firm footing, as does the complicated licensing a royalty structure of HEVC.
The true test of AV1 will be whether or not it is able to hold its own against HEVC should the latter lower their costs. For now that does not appear to be the case, but as AV1 starts to be rolled out it could change.
For users the introduction of AV1 support and its eventual full adoption should mean that the file sizes of videos are smaller. Initially the difference should be most noticeable in terms of the data consumption required by streaming videos, as well as the speed required to stream high resolution video.
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If AV1 is true to its promise of being a royalty-free format, it will significantly reduce the costs of streaming giants that use it – such as YouTube, Netflix, and Facebook. Outside of streaming it is likely that other video creators will also start to adopt the format if it becomes as ubiquitous as it aims to be.
