AV1 Takes the Lead in the Codec Wars

AV1 is quickly maturing and experiencing accelerated adoption, despite being just over four years old since its release

Hardware vendors such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have started integrating AV1 encoding capabilities into their products.

Additionally, many TV manufacturers have also included hardware decoder support for AV1.

MediaTek and Samsung have recently announced hardware decoding for AV1 in their mobile systems-on-chip (SoC), and Qualcomm has also announced hardware support for AV1 in their upcoming Snapdragon SoC. 

The hope is that adoption will begin at the high-end and then gradually move towards lower-end mobile devices over the next one or two years. 

Ryan Lei, Software Engineer, Video Codec Specialist at Meta, also notes that their software is already highly optimized to support encoding on most existing Android platforms.

The ecosystem topology is much better than it was a few years ago, which is encouraging.

Krishna Rapaka, a video researcher at Twitch/Amazon, has observed explosive growth in AV1 adoption, particularly in the OTT workspace where AV1 is taking a considerable share from H.265/HEVC.

According to anecdotal evidence, AV1 adoption is growing at a rate of 30% to 40% year over year, which is quite remarkable.

However, while most of this growth is currently driven by software, hardware solutions are crucial for services like Twitch due to their density and scalability requirements.
 

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