AV1 is an open, royalty-free codec published in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media — a consortium that exists largely because H.265's licensing made the web's biggest video distributors look for an alternative. Published comparisons put it roughly 30% ahead of H.265 and 50% or more ahead of H.264 at equal quality.
Its history is that it was, for years, impractically slow to encode: early reference encoders were hundreds of times slower than x264. That is no longer the case. SVT-AV1 brought software encoding into the range where it is a reasonable choice, and hardware encoders shipped in recent GPUs make it routine.
Where it stands today:
- Decode support is broad in browsers — Chrome, Firefox and Edge have had it for years, Safari since 2023 on hardware that supports it.
- Hardware decode is the constraint on mobile and TV. Devices older than a few years often lack it, and software decoding AV1 on a phone is a battery decision as much as a compatibility one.
- The big platforms already use it. YouTube and Netflix serve AV1 to clients that advertise support.
For a file you are sending to one person, AV1 is still the risky choice and H.264 the safe one. For content you serve at scale, the bandwidth argument is now decisive.