Does AV1 Drain Your Battery? Hardware vs Software Decoding

Your laptop fan spins up, the back gets warm, and the battery percentage drops like a stone - all from watching a YouTube video. If that sounds familiar, the AV1 video codec is very likely the reason.
 

What AV1 actually is

AV1 is a modern video codec - the technology that squeezes video into a smaller file so it streams using less data. It is free for anyone to use, which is why YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, and others have moved to it in a big way.

The trade-off is that AV1 is harder for a device to unpack (decode) than older codecs like H.264. That extra work is where your battery quietly disappears.

Hardware vs software decoding - the whole ballgame

There are two ways a device can decode an AV1 video, and the gap between them is huge.

Hardware decoding uses a dedicated chip built for exactly this job. It sips power, stays cool, and plays smoothly. When your device does this, AV1 is actually more efficient than older codecs, because there is less data to move around.

Software decoding is the fallback when that chip is missing. Now your main processor (the CPU) has to do the heavy lifting. It runs flat out, heats up, and burns power fast.

How big is the difference? One careful test on an Apple MacBook without an AV1 chip found that software-decoding an AV1 video used roughly ten times more power than playing the same clip with hardware decoding.

Ten times. That is the difference between a warm, draining laptop and a cool, quiet one.

How to tell if this is happening to you

You do not need any tools to spot the symptoms. If a specific video service (especially YouTube) makes your device hot, loud, or drains it far faster than normal video playback, software AV1 decoding is the prime suspect.

To confirm on a computer, check whether your chip supports AV1 hardware decoding. On Apple, that means the A17 Pro and newer iPhones (iPhone 15 Pro and every iPhone 16 and 17), and Macs with the M3 chip or later - the M5, released in 2026, handles it easily.

Most Windows laptops and smart TVs from 2022 onward have it too. Older gear generally does not.

If your device is from before roughly 2022, assume it is falling back to software - and that the drain is real, not your imagination.

How to fix the AV1 battery drain

The good news: you have several easy options, from quickest to most thorough.

Play files locally with a good codec pack. For your own video files, a proper decoder set handles AV1 far more gracefully than a random media player.

The free K-Lite Codec Pack installs the LAV Filters that decode AV1, HEVC, VP9, and everything else in one go, and it will use your hardware decoder when one is available.

If you only need AV1 support on Windows 10 or 11, grab the standalone AV1 codec download instead.

Force an older, hardware-friendly codec. If your device has no AV1 chip, playing video in H.264 or HEVC (which almost all devices decode in hardware) will save serious battery. Our guide on whether AV1 is really better than H.265 walks through when each one wins for your specific hardware.

Check a clip fast without installing anything. To sanity-check an H.265 file in your browser, the online HEVC player plays it and shows codec details, no download required.

In Firefox, you can switch AV1 off. Firefox is the one browser that enables AV1 by default, so on a machine with no AV1 chip it can hurt battery the most. Type about:config in the address bar and set media.av1.enabled to false - the browser then falls back to a codec your hardware can handle.

The part most guides skip: your battery and charger

Software decoding does not just drain your battery faster - over time, all that heat and those extra full-charge cycles wear the battery down sooner.

So the other half of the fix is simply keeping your gear well powered and charging it properly.

If you are constantly topping up phones, tablets, cameras, and portable players, it is worth using the right charger and cells for each device rather than whatever came in the box.

VoltRated's independent battery and charger guides cover exactly that - no fake capacity ratings, just what actually holds up.

AV1 is here to stay, and on modern hardware it is a genuine win - smaller files, smooth playback, cool and efficient. The battery problem only shows up when your device has to decode it in software.

Check whether your hardware supports AV1, lean on a solid codec pack for local files, and switch to an older codec when your device is older. Do that, and the mysterious battery drain goes away.