AV2 Codec Official Release Set for May 29

AV2

After years of development, AV2 finally seems to have locked in its official release date. As the highly anticipated successor to the widely revered AV1, AV2 continues the tradition of being an open-source, royalty-free video codec (a project that has been actively in the works since 2020).

Upon its release, AV2 is set to go head-to-head with the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. However, unlike VVC, AV2 maintains its predecessor’s commitment to remaining entirely royalty-free for developers and distributors.

The Current Landscape

For years, H.264/AVC was the undisputed king of the video codec world. Released in the early 2000s, it completely dominated the industry. The unfortunate reality today is that H.264 still retains a massive market share by sheer volume. Its universal hardware support across older devices makes it the safest, most reliable fallback codec for web video delivery and other media like 1080p Blu-ray discs.

Its successor, H.265/HEVC, has achieved deep market penetration, while AV1 has steadily gained traction over the last few years. A massive turning point for AV1 was Apple introducing hardware-accelerated decoding in its A17 Pro and M3 chips. That covers three generations of iPhones, starting from the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

Yet, this timeline highlights the slow burn of codec adoption. We are still years away from AV1 becoming the universal standard. There is a running joke on Reddit that Apple won’t support AV2 until 2040. Considering AV1 was released in 2018 and Apple only adopted it roughly three years ago, 2040 might not actually be the exaggeration it was intended to be!

As legacy devices phase out, we will eventually see H.264 lose its grip. When that happens, AV1 will likely take center stage alongside HEVC. Only then will AV2 truly begin to see the mainstream hardware adoption curve that AV1 is experiencing today.

Despite this long timeline, AV1 is poised for rapid growth, as supported by data from NETINT and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), the consortium behind both AV1 and AV2.

Source: NETINT

The Big Release

Here is the big news: We are only a couple of days away from AV2’s official release on May 29. The codec has already generated massive buzz in the streaming world due to a promising list of technical improvements over AV1.

This release date was leaked on Reddit by an eagle-eyed user who spotted a pre-dated changelog for the 1.0.0 release in the AV2 GitHub repository. You can see the snapshots below:

There is also a fun, sarcastic (yet painfully realistic) Reddit thread highlighting the long road to hardware adoption we mentioned earlier:

The Promise of AV2

So what are these big improvements AV2 is planning to bring over AV1?

• Next-Gen Support: Enhanced support for AR/VR (Augmented/Virtual Reality) applications.
• Superior compression It features significant architectural upgrades, including a highly refined intra-frame prediction engine. This is a crucial advantage as the internet braces for an influx of 4K, 8K, and high-framerate content.
• Massive Bandwidth Savings: Early AV2 prototypes have already demonstrated over a 30% improvement in bitrate efficiency compared to AV1 at the exact same visual quality.
• Larger Superblocks: The maximum superblock size has been doubled from 128x128 to 256x256. This specifically enhances the sharpness of text and screen-shared content, keeping details crisp while maintaining minimal bitrates.