I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think I can at least sort of understand why they're going with this speed of release cadence. If the release cadence is too slow, you might end up with another JPEG situation where the new codec is undeniably better in every way, but nobody wants to implement it since the old standard was around for so long without any competition.

That is what I have been saying for close to 10 years now. We are quite close to Patents free H.264 High Profile.

You will always have to provide H.264 as baseline due to compatibility. And that has a cost of storage. Bandwidth cost have been declining fast, and with AI Capex it doesn't seems to be slowing down either. Meanwhile Storage cost hasn't drop, if anything recent trend suggest it may have plateau and went up for HDD.

H.264 1080P 2Mbps is good enough for a lot of things. Just like how MPEG-2 is still getting encoder improvement ~30 years later so is H.264 encoder.

There are other codec like LCEVC which you can apply on top of H.264 can provide up to 60% bitrate reduction for 4K content. This saves on storage cost and provide enough benefits.

It is only in streaming services like Netflix where the catalog of video are low enough they could afford to re-encode it every 5- 8 months and storage cost is minimal.

Again a new codec introduction is easily a 10 years task. Higher Speed PON is already being tested, while others are working on NGS-PON2 roll out. 5G Home Broadband with Massive MIMO. The true free and open Video Codec may not be AV1 or AV2, but H.264.

h266 (aka VVC) is seemingly ~~late in development~~ (edit: It has been released but doesn't have much hardware uptake yet). They probably want to ensure that people are aware that it will be matched so that they don't commit to it and AV2 ends up a bit late to the party like AV1 is compared to h265 where it had a notable compatibility lead.

If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h266 and wait for the open alternative to ship.

I do. I watch scifi shows over the internet with my friends. We watch it together on a web page with an html5 video element served out of my apartment. I've had to re-encode it to 3 megabits per second (to avoid stutter/buffering) with no b-frames. When initially setting it up, I tested both H264 and AV1 at that bitrate and H264 looked considerably worse. No surprise there, considering H264 is old enough to drink (22 years) whereas AV1 is only 7 years old.

Media companies want to save on bandwidth, content types keep changing (e.g. HDR), people want live calls to work whenever, and so on as well. At the same time, GIF still isn't completely gone either just because people needed more than what GIF could give them.

>Safari has a low market share

That is 1.6B iPhone + iPad. I wouldn't say that is low market share. It still have 25-30% of devices.

h264 is 22 years old as well. AV1 is only seven!

I suspect (with no inside knowledge) that this is a battery life play. CPU decoding == bye bye battery. It is much better to force the server to serve you something that you CAN hardware-decode.

> Is this intended to be competitive with h.266/VVC? And is it?

Yes:

> VVC is not alone in the video coding race. AV1, backed by AOMedia, has already gained traction, although its performance does not make it a direct competitor to VVC in high-end applications. The upcoming AV2, as well as AI-driven encoding techniques, could pose challenges to VVC’s success. Nevertheless, VVC’s strong technical foundation, industry support, and clear intellectual property structure position it as a promising long-term solution for video coding.

* https://www.nokia.com/blog/the-future-of-video-compression-i...

> For businesses focused on reducing operational costs, this is a key point in the h.266 vs av1 debate. While the H.266/VVC codec offers powerful compression improvements over h.265, AV1—and eventually AV2—may be more attractive thanks to simpler licensing and long-term affordability.

* https://www.dacast.com/blog/h266-vvc-versatile-video-coding/

Not qualified to answer.

AV1 competes with VVC. AV2 will be competitive with h.267

See "Encoding" column in table:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware_encoding_and_deco...

Intel Arc, AMD Radeon 7000 series, Pixel 8, GeForce 40, and a few others.

Intel meteor lake chips support AV1 encode/decode.

Last two generations of nvidia or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVENC

I implemented an encoding pipeline for AV1 for vids uploaded to my social news site (think reddit competitor except I'm extremely small fry). I eventually removed the code for it.

While the space savings and quality improvements are good, the encoding speed is an order of magnitude slower than using h264/vp9. In the end the user experience of causing people to wait significantly longer for an AV1 encode wasn't worth the tradeoff. To fix the user experience problem, I still had to encode a h264 version anyway, which kinda defeats the point when it comes to space savings. You still get data transfer improvements, but the break even point for when the encoding costs offset the data transfer costs were around 1000 views per min of video encoded, and as an average I'm far below that.

IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.

Worth keeping in mind I was looking at this ~2 years ago, so things may have evolved since then.

AV1 is really one of those things born out of internet providers (e.g. Google, Amazon) put together so they can deliver content more efficiently with their bandwidth without needing to deal with a complicated web of royalties in addition to paying said royalties. There's plenty of people using AV1 or it's image format but don't realize it.

Also, video encoding pretty much always comes with the tradeoff of more efficient = uses more processing power

I did some testing with the 3 main AV1 encoders with gifs (avif). They’re pretty good. But not as good as jpeg xl but currently basically only Safari supports it.

See my blog: https://catskull.net/libaom-vs-svtav1-vs-rav1e-2025.html

For most “normie” use cases, I’d recommend cloudflares image transforms which are available on free tier. I actually wrote a small Jekyll plugin for my site to auto prefix images with their transform. Idk why but shipping optimized images is just one of those things that tickles me!

https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/transform-images/

Lots of people are using AV1. They just don't know it.

In my experience (not professional, encoding various files for archiving or sharing), AV1 perform quite well for low bitrate situation/streaming, and the encoder is reasonably fast (not as fast as h264 ofc, but that's decades of work on it).

But for higher quality encoding, I personally found that h265/HVEC almost always beat it, with similar encoding time.

As for AV2, I just hope that we get a good open-source encoder.

I manually turn AV1 off on my android phone. It uses more battery and won't sustain 1440p at 1.5x speed up without the odd frameskip.

Netflix streams in AV1 to devices that support it.

I use AV1, it is very efficent

Encoder are extremely slow.

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