The Future of Video Codecs: HEVC, AV1, VVC and AI Compression

Every few years the industry declares a new codec inevitable. Here is what has actually happened, and what is genuinely coming next.

A video codec decides how much bandwidth a stream costs and whether it plays at all on a given device.

Those two things pull in opposite directions, which is why no single codec has ever won outright.

What follows is where each of the current contenders actually stands, with the marketing numbers left out.

H.264 - Still Everywhere, and That Is the Point

H.264 is nearly twenty years old and remains the only codec you can send anywhere with total confidence.

It is inefficient by modern standards, needing substantially more bitrate than anything newer for the same 4K quality. It is also decoded in hardware by essentially every device ever made, and encodes fast enough for live video on modest hardware.

That combination keeps it in place for live streaming and for any file that simply has to play. Our look at whether H.264 is on the way out covers where it is finally losing ground.

HEVC - Entrenched Rather Than Winning

HEVC, standardised as H.265 in 2013, delivers roughly half the bitrate of H.264 for comparable quality. That is what made 4K streaming practical.

Netflix, Amazon and Disney built their 4K infrastructure on it, and nearly every phone sold since 2018 decodes it in hardware. Infrastructure that large does not get replaced quickly.

Its problem has always been licensing. Multiple patent pools, unclear terms, and a resulting reluctance from open-source projects and anyone without a legal department. YouTube declines to use it for delivery for exactly this reason.

Browser support is nonetheless better than its reputation suggests - Safari has had it for years, Chrome since version 107, Firefox since 134. On Windows you may still need to get the HEVC extension for system playback.

AV1 - The One That Actually Arrived

AV1 came from the Alliance for Open Media, backed by Google, Netflix, Amazon and most of the industry that was tired of paying HEVC royalties.

It compresses roughly 30% better than HEVC and carries no licence fee. Netflix put it on Android in February 2020, and YouTube now serves a great deal of its higher-resolution catalogue in it.

The old objection was hardware, and that objection has largely expired. AV1 decoders are now standard in recent laptops, phones and graphics cards, and where software decoding is needed dav1d handles it far more efficiently than early implementations did.

Apple is the remaining gap. Safari decodes AV1 only on M3 Macs, the M4 iPad Pro and iPhone 15 Pro or later, because Apple never shipped a software decoder for older devices.

Encoding was the other objection, and it has moved too. SVT-AV1 narrowed the gap dramatically, and consumer GPUs now include AV1 hardware encoders - NVENC among them - which is why game streaming picked it up.

VVC - Technically Excellent, Commercially Stalled

VVC, or H.266, was finalised in 2020 and targets roughly half the bitrate of HEVC again.

On paper it is the most capable codec available, with genuine advantages for 8K, high dynamic range and 360-degree video.

In practice it has been waiting six years for silicon. VVC is complex enough that it needs dedicated hardware rather than a software update, and consumer devices carrying a VVC decoder remain scarce.

Licensing is the familiar second problem. The terms are less tangled than HEVC's but they still exist, and they still deter exactly the open-source implementers who gave AV1 its momentum.

Its most likely home is broadcast and premium distribution, where a small number of large organisations control both ends and can justify the hardware.

What AI Actually Does Here

"AI codec" covers two very different things, and only one of them is real today.

The speculative version is a neural network that replaces the codec outright, learning content patterns instead of applying fixed transforms. Research results are genuinely striking, and nothing in this category is close to shipping in a consumer device.

The version already in production is far less glamorous and far more useful. Machine learning picks encoder settings, scene by scene, for codecs that already exist.

Per-title and per-scene encoding decides how much bitrate a given shot deserves rather than applying one setting to a whole film. Netflix's VMAF quality metric is a large part of how that gets measured, and it is freely available.

Upscaling on the display end is the third strand - televisions reconstructing detail locally so less has to be sent. Our piece on AI and next-generation codecs goes further into where this is heading.

Where This Actually Goes

Forecasting codecs is a good way to look foolish later, so treat this as direction rather than schedule.

The pattern worth noticing is that licensing has decided more of this than compression efficiency has. VVC is the better codec on paper and AV1 is winning, because one is free to implement and the other is not.

What This Means If You Are Not a Streaming Platform

Most of the above is interesting rather than actionable. Three things are not.

• Encoding your own video. H.264 for anything that must play everywhere and AV1 when you control the encode time, both of which HandBrake handles.
• Playback problems. Almost always a missing decoder rather than a broken file, and VLC carries its own for everything discussed here.
• Battery and heat. If a video service makes your laptop hot, that is software decoding, and what AV1 does to your battery covers the fix.

To find out which of these your own machine decodes in hardware, our Codec Checker tests your browser and GPU directly, and Codec Finder reads what is inside a file.

If you want the mechanics rather than the politics, how codecs work explains what happens between the file and the screen, and which codec to stream in compares the current four head to head.

For local playback on Windows without thinking about any of it, Windows Media Player plus the right extension covers most cases, and our guide on how to enable AV1 on YouTube handles the browser side.

Quick questions

Licensing has shaped this more than compression ever did. The best codec on paper keeps losing to the one anyone can use for free.

Run the Codec Checker to see which of these your own hardware handles, or tell us what you think wins by 2030.