AV1: the codec that finally made open video competitive
AV1 is a royalty-free video codec from the Alliance for Open Media. It typically saves 30–50% bitrate versus H.264 at the same quality — but encoding cost and hardware support still decide when you should use it.
For a decade, web video meant H.264. It was everywhere, hardware-accelerated, and good enough. The next step — HEVC/H.265 — was better on paper and a mess in practice: patent pools, licensing fees, and uneven browser support.
AV1 is the industry's answer. It is a royalty-free codec from the Alliance for Open Media (Google, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and others). The goal is simple: match or beat HEVC quality without the legal tax.
What you actually get
Compared with H.264 at the same perceptual quality, AV1 typically needs 30–50% less bitrate. Versus HEVC, the gap is smaller — often 20–30% — but you avoid HEVC licensing.
That matters at scale. If you serve millions of hours of video, a 30% bitrate cut is CDN cost, not a codec trivia fact.
AV1 also has strong tools for modern content:
- Film grain synthesis (send noise as a model, not as pixels)
- Better intra prediction and larger superblocks (up to 128×128)
- Constrained directional enhancement filter (CDEF) and loop restoration
- Screen-content tools for UI, slides, and games
The trade-off: encode is expensive
Decode is the easy part now. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Android, and recent smart TVs all play AV1. Hardware decode exists on recent Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek chips.
Encode is still the bottleneck.
| Encoder | Role |
|---|---|
| libaom | Reference. Highest quality. Slow. |
| SVT-AV1 | Production default for many pipelines. Scalable. |
| rav1e | Rust. Useful, not the throughput king. |
| Hardware (Intel, NVIDIA, Apple) | Fast. Quality lags software at low bitrates. |
A practical pattern:
- Use SVT-AV1 (or hardware) for the live / high-volume ladder.
- Use a slower libaom or high-effort SVT preset for hero titles and archival masters.
- Keep H.264 (and often AAC audio) as a compatibility rung for old devices.
When to ship AV1
Ship it when at least two of these are true:
- Your viewers have hardware decode (phones and TVs from ~2021 onward).
- Bandwidth cost dominates encode cost.
- You already maintain an ABR ladder and can add one more codec, not replace H.264 overnight.
- You care about royalty-free distribution (app stores, web, user-generated content).
Skip it — for now — when you encode on a laptop for a one-off file, or when your audience is old set-top boxes with no AV1 silicon.
A sane starting point
For VOD with SVT-AV1:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 32 -preset 6 -g 240 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k output.mkv
Notes:
- CRF 30–35 is a reasonable quality band for 1080p web delivery. Lower CRF = more bits.
- Preset 6–8 is a good speed/quality compromise. Drop toward 4 for archival.
- Use Opus or AAC for audio. AV1 is video only.
- Package as CMAF / fragmented MP4 if you stream; MKV is fine for files.
For the web, prefer MP4/CMAF with AV1 + Opus or AAC inside MSE or HLS/DASH, not a single MKV.
What to watch next
AV1 is no longer experimental. YouTube, Netflix, Meta, and Cloudflare already serve it. The remaining work is operational: faster encodes, better two-pass / content-adaptive encoding, and AV2 on the horizon.
If you run a video pipeline in 2026 and you still only emit H.264, you are paying extra for every viewer. Add AV1 as a ladder rung. Keep H.264 as the floor. Measure CDN savings before you chase encoder presets into the ground.