If you are a just a regular guy then there is a probability that you had come across a situation where you want you to play a video file but the video players showing some error message that video codec not supported to install that codec. That may be the first time you have heard about video codec. There are lots of video codec available characterising on different parameters and necessity. AV1 Video is just a new video codec developed by AOMedia or Alliance for Open Media. This AV1 video codec has brought revolution in video file format and video streaming expandability as its takes lesser file size and gives you better video quality than HEVC or H.265.
Before we discuss this new AV1 Video codec lets put some light what is video codec?
Video Codec or codec is known as compressor and decompressor. It is a hardware or software process to compress the raw video data and then decompress it to watch, edit or transmit the video file in a convenient way. For example, H.264 is the most common video codec nowadays we use it. Please don’t confuse between video file formats like MP4 AVI with Video codec H.264 or the latest AV1. Video file format or multimedia file format is a container or package having video codec and audio codec.
Now lets comes to the AV1 codec and why it is the best codec at the time writing this article. AV1 is an open source royalty free video coding format developed by Alliance for Open Media for the video transmission over the internet which is founded by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.
Video compression always has been dominated by MPEG or Motion Pictures Experts Group and H.264 codec is still famous which developed in 2003. Its successor H.265 codec know as HEVC which you may have seen on Google Pixel Camera App settings to save file size than H.264. But now its high time to use AV1 codec instead of HEVC or H.265. First of all AV1 codec is royalty-free and in terms of efficiency, AV1 is 30% more efficient than H.265.
As the main purpose of AV1 codec is to stream video being open source and royalty-free Google Chrome and Firefox browsers have enabled support for AV1 and Microsoft has released AV1 Extension for Windows 10. YouTube also introduced a test page to check AV1 codec functionality.
In conclusion, I want to draw that technology is changing and we must adopt what’s new. AV1 is the new video codec and I am pretty sure that it will be the online video streaming wormhole.