pump the brakes —

Nvidia and AMD's AV1 encoders aren't yet supported, but it astir apt won't beryllium long.

Andrew Cunningham - Dec 29, 2022 8:50 p.m. UTC

Alliance for Open Media

Hardware and bundle enactment for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has been steadily gathering implicit the past mates years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding is becoming modular successful much GPUs, phone SoCs, and different hardware, portion streaming video services similar YouTube and Netflix person begun serving AV1-encoded video to devices that enactment it.

Open-source bundle projects are opening to travel suit, too. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) bundle has been expanding its AV1 capabilities successful caller releases, and present the Handbrake video transcoding app has added AV1 enactment arsenic well. Version 1.6.0, released yesterday, has added enactment for encoding AV1 video utilizing some CPU-based SVT-AV1 bundle encoding arsenic good arsenic via Intel's AV1-capable QuickSync video encoder included successful its Arc GPUs.

Nvidia and AMD's latest RTX 4000- and RX 7000-series GPUs besides see hardware encoding enactment for AV1, but the bundle needed to usage it hasn't been built into Handbrake yet.

AV1 is an open-source video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a radical that includes dense manufacture hitters similar Google, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, and Microsoft. Like the H.265/HEVC codec, AV1 enables overmuch much businesslike video compression than the aged H.264 codec, allowing for streaming of 4K and HDR video without requiring a monolithic summation successful bandwidth comparative to 1080p video. Unlike HEVC, enactment for the AV1 codec tin beryllium added to conscionable astir thing without paying royalties.

HEVC's main payment implicit AV1 arsenic of this penning is that it enjoys overmuch wider enactment than AV1 crossed galore generations of hardware from astir large manufacturers. Roku supports AV1 decoding successful immoderate of its higher-end streaming devices, but allegedly pushed backmost against Google erstwhile the institution tried to unit Roku to enactment AV1 decoding crossed its full lineup. Apple's AV1 plans are besides murky—the institution is simply a subordinate of the AOMedia radical and immoderate rudimentary AV1 enactment has appeared in its developer documentation recently, but hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding and encoding either isn't supported oregon hasn't been enabled successful its astir caller Apple Silicon chips.