AV2 brings more data savings for mobile video, hits key milestone

The AV1 video codec has been around since 2018, and it offers better efficiency and higher quality than its predecessors. Platforms like YouTube and Netflix support AV1 playback, while the Pixel 10 phones were the first to let you record videos in the format. However, a successor codec is official, and it has just reached a key milestone.

The Alliance for Open Media recently released the definitive AV2 codec specifications (h/t: Neowin), bringing it a step closer to commercial adoption. So what should you expect from AV2 compared to AV1?

We’ve got varying claims regarding AV2’s efficiency compared to AV1. The alliance noted late last year that it saw gains of 28.6% and 32.6% in two separate metrics. Meanwhile, VLC project lead Jean-Baptiste Kempf suggests gains of roughly 25%, with larger gains seen in a few other tests.

Either way, this is great news if you’re streaming AV2 video on a compatible device. This means you should expect the same video quality for ~25 to ~32% less bandwidth than AV1, or significantly improved video quality for the same bandwidth as the current codec.

On the other hand, Kempf reports that AV2 playback is roughly five times more complex than AV1:

In practice, that means software running on today’s hardware will struggle to decode AV2 in real time without careful, architecture-specific optimization.

To that end, Kempf and the team are working on the dav2d software-based AV2 decoder. This succeeds the dav1d AV1 decoder currently used in VLC, Windows, Android, and numerous other platforms.

It might be a while before all major platforms and hardware makers adopt AV2, though. AV1 was first launched in 2018, with YouTube tentatively adopting it that same year. Netflix adopted the codec in 2020. On the hardware front, 2019’s MediaTek Dimensity 1000 was the first smartphone chip to support hardware-based AV1 decoding/playback. By contrast, 2022’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was the first Snapdragon chip with this capability. We’ve also seen software-based AV1 decoding for devices without the requisite hardware, and Google made this mandatory with Android 14.

Oddly enough, it took until the Pixel 10 launch for us to see the first smartphones with AV1 encoding, allowing users to capture AV1 video. But we haven’t seen any other phones with this functionality just yet. Instead, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and vivo X300 Ultra adopted the APV codec. Unlike AV1, this codec focuses on professional-tier video capture rather than shrinking file sizes.

In any event, we’re glad AV2 is a step closer to commercial reality. But we really hope smartphone makers eventually adopt it for video capture, as it’s a handy way to save storage space.