YouTube is testing usage of AV1 codec for videos
Youtube is experimenting with AV1 transcoded videos on its platform. Beta version of browsers that support it shows AV1 with a tiny small selection of just fourteen videos.
AV1 currently is supported (beta) in Chrome 70 as well as the nightly builds of Firefox 63 in which media.av1.enabled and media.mediasource.experimental.enabled must be enabled. This is news because AV1 is a royalty-free video coding format with a lot of potential in quality and saving bandwidth. AV1 offers improved compression compared to vp9 or hevc, the video bandwidth reduction can run upwards to 30 to 40 percent, without you seeing a difference.
Participants (you can check it out in test tube yourself) should activate 'Prefer AV1 for SD' in the settings. Mind you that currently only a resolution lower than 480p is supported, higher resolutions YouTube still shows VP9. The videos are encoded at high bit rates to test the performance of the decoder.
AV1 is developed based on an Alliance that includes parties like Google, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. It could be the next big royalty-free codec for the future as an alternative for HEVC and VP9.
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Senior Member
Posts: 17414
Joined: 2009-02-25
Should be, you can right click on a video on Youtube and select the "Stats for nerds." option and it should show the current encoder and stats for video playback and how it's running. Different browsers have varying support for whatever Google is throwing into Chrome and on to the Youtube website at a moments notice though but it's improving. GPU hardware video decoding support could also vary a bit depending on max resolution supported and formats like h265 but I believe AMD and NVIDIA's current-gen lineup covers most of it.

EDIT: Well now I've been quite thoroughly corrected then in how support for this is currently doing for hardware acceleration, good to know how it is even if it's not as supported as I was expecting.

Senior Member
Posts: 3310
Joined: 2011-11-24
It's not supported:
https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix
(Go to the second table for NVDEC.)
Which makes sense, since AV1 was not a thing when current GPUs were being designed.
Senior Member
Posts: 1460
Joined: 2011-02-17
No GPU right now has any official support for AV1. Hopefully, shader decoding or hybrid will be viable and supported by AMD, Nvidia (hybrid HEVC for example is supported on Kepler, though not VP9) and Intel.
Another option could be if an OpenCL decoder is viable.
Senior Member
Posts: 4108
Joined: 2003-03-03
I always wondered why not just do a generic OpenCL decoder. Obviously it would be less efficient than specific HW decoding, but it would open the way for better support for specification revisions, new specifications (like this AV1), and would allow any OpenCL capable HW to use it (and the list of OpenCL capable HW isn't small).
Senior Member
Posts: 144
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Does anyone know if AV1 supported by current generations of GPUs like VP9?