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Glossary · codec

What is AV1?

AV1 is a royalty-free, open-source video codec from the Alliance for Open Media. It compresses about 30% more efficiently than H.265 and 50% more efficiently than H.264, meaning the same visual quality at half the bitrate of older codecs. YouTube serves AV1 to browsers and devices that support it.

Also called:av-1 · aom-av1

AV1 was designed to replace VP9 and compete with H.265 without licensing fees. It launched in 2018 and reached production-quality encoders around 2021. Today every modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) decodes AV1 in software or hardware, and most newer phones and TVs have hardware decoders.

The catch is encoding. AV1 encodes 10-50× slower than H.264 in software. Hardware AV1 encoders started shipping in 2022 (Intel Arc, NVIDIA RTX 40-series, Apple M3) and have closed most of the gap, but for software-only encoding it remains the slowest mainstream codec.

When you download a "1080p AV1" stream from YouTube, you get a smaller file than the H.264 1080p version with no quality loss. The catch is playback: an old laptop without hardware AV1 may decode in software, which works but uses noticeably more battery.

Common questions

Does my device play AV1?
Every modern browser plays AV1 in software. Hardware decoders are in iPhone 15 Pro and later, Pixel 6+, recent Samsung flagships, and most desktop GPUs from 2022 onward. Software decoding works everywhere but draws more power.
AV1 vs H.265 — which is better?
AV1 compresses ~25-30% better at equivalent quality. H.265 has wider hardware support and faster encoders. For YouTube downloads where the bytes already exist, AV1 saves disk space at no quality cost.

Related terms

Codec

A codec is the algorithm that encodes (compresses) and decodes raw audio or video into a smaller stream.

VP9

VP9 is a royalty-free video codec developed by Google, used widely on YouTube and in WebM files.

H.265 (HEVC)

H.

H.264 (AVC)

H.

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