AV1 has been hyped as a game-changer for streaming giants and everyday users alike. A patent-free codec that beats H.264 and HEVC on efficiency sounds great, but what is the catch? Here is an honest techie's breakdown.
This one is a written deep-dive, so there is no video to embed here. I break down hardware, software, and the tech behind them on the channel. Subscribe to catch new videos the moment they go live.
This is a guest perspective written for CK Tech Check by Nathan Larsen.
Editor's note (July 2026): This piece is from late 2022, when the big knock on AV1 was thin hardware support. That has changed. AV1 encode is now common: it arrived on NVIDIA's RTX 40 and 50 series, AMD's RX 7000 cards and newer, and Intel Arc, and Apple added AV1 decode starting with the A17 Pro and M3 chips. AV1 also streams widely on YouTube and Netflix now. The fundamentals below, patent-free and highly efficient, still hold.
AV1 is a genuinely big deal. It is roughly 50 percent more efficient than H.264 and about 20 percent better than HEVC, and unlike either of them it is patent-free. The one real drawback when this was written was speed: encoding AV1 was slow unless you had bleeding-edge hardware. That gap has since narrowed sharply as hardware encoders became mainstream.
More efficient than H.264 and HEVC, and free of patents.Or at least as patent-free as you can get. A few companies have claimed their patents apply to AV1 and tried to collect license fees, but Google and the other members of the Alliance for Open Media that developed it have pushed back hard. First, they will pay for any patent litigation if someone comes after you for using AV1. Second, all of the free patent licenses from Alliance members self-destruct the moment you attempt any patent litigation at all, which puts a would-be enforcer in a far worse spot than where they started.
To see why that matters, look at what happened with the older codecs. About a month before this was written, Fedora, the Linux distribution, actually had to pull H.264 and H.265/HEVC hardware acceleration from its default install because it turned out to be technically infringing on various patents. With H.264 specifically, the patent holders did not just charge for codec implementations, they tried to put a royalty on distributing H.264-encoded content. Embedding a video on your website could owe a fee. They eventually said they would not enforce royalties on free video distributed over the internet, and then more or less gave up enforcing it at all after everyone refused to pay.
This is Google's motivation in a nutshell. They run YouTube, which reencodes an enormous volume of video every day and distributes far more than that. So they have a direct economic incentive both to get smaller file sizes and to avoid formats that make them pay royalties. That is what briefly cost Roku the rights to YouTube TV: one of Google's conditions was that any future device had to include a hardware AV1 decoder, because Google intends to go AV1-only as much as possible within a few years. They have reportedly built out an entire data center, or at least a very large chunk of one, just to transcode the YouTube library to AV1.
AV1 hits those numbers with a much more efficient frequency transform, plus a toolbox of options that adapt the encoder to different kinds of video:
The main issue with AV1 at the time was that it was new and slow. It improved constantly, but software AV1 encoders ran at best around real-time speed and often slower, and hardware encoders were essentially unavailable outside dedicated accelerator cards. Here was the hardware landscape as of late 2022:
The Apple situation is the odd one. Apple is a member of the Alliance for Open Media and apparently invested in AV1, yet had not adopted it. The guess here is that it is like the Lightning versus USB-C saga: Apple helped fund the open standard to have a seat at the design table, but stuck with its own proprietary approach until an outside force, the EU or Google, pushed it to change. (See the editor's note above for how much of this hardware picture has since flipped.)
AV1, or AOMedia Video 1, is a modern video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. It is patent-free and highly efficient, roughly 50 percent better than H.264 and about 20 percent better than H.265/HEVC, which is why streaming companies like Google have pushed it hard.
Effectively yes. It is designed to be patent and royalty-free, and the Alliance for Open Media backs that up: members will cover patent litigation for users, and their free patent licenses self-destruct if a member tries to sue over AV1, which strongly discourages anyone from enforcing patents against it.
Money and control. Google runs YouTube, which reencodes and distributes a huge volume of video, so smaller AV1 file sizes save bandwidth, and a royalty-free codec avoids the license fees that formats like H.264 charged. Google intends to move as much of its ecosystem to AV1 as possible.
On efficiency, yes. AV1 is roughly 20 percent more efficient than HEVC, meaning smaller files at similar quality, and it avoids HEVC's patent and royalty issues entirely. The historical trade-off was slower encoding, which has largely been solved as AV1 hardware encoders became common.
Its main historical downside was encoding speed. When AV1 was newer, software encoding was slow and hardware encoders were rare, so you needed cutting-edge hardware for fast results. That gap has closed considerably now that AV1 encode is built into recent GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
The summary is simple: AV1 is about 50 percent better than H.264 and 20 percent better than HEVC, with none of the patent baggage. The only real asterisk when this was written was that it was slow to encode without bleeding-edge hardware. Given how quickly that hardware arrived, AV1's path from promising to everywhere looks well underway.