Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 30, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Because the license payments required for H.265 patents conflict with free redistribution and are also extremely high, the industry is steadily pushing forward the development of AV1 (long form: AOMedia Video 1). For this purpose, various companies from all sectors have joined together as the Alliance for Open Media consortium (Aomedia). These include hardware developers such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, streaming service providers such as Netflix and Amazon, as well as Google and Cisco. Due to H.265’s complicated licensing requirements, all of them are interested in the new, free codec. AV1 is considered the successor to Google’s VP9, which is intended to stand up to HEVC/H.265 from the Moving Picture Experts Group.
High quality of AV1
Of course, a great deal can be expected from such a pooling of developer expertise. According to Golem, the codec can deliver better quality in the details compared with H.265, especially at low bit rates. A direct comparison with H.264 makes clear how good the improvements now are. However, AV1 still has one problem: the encoder is still very slow. The royalty-free video codec is not yet finished, but it could already be ready in a few months.
