AV1

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. In 2018, Facebook re-encoded 400 compressed Facebook videos with AV1, VP9, and x264 and found AV1 delivered around 34% lower bitrates than VP9 and about 50% lower than x264 at similar visual quality, though encoding was much slower. Like VP9, but unlike H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that does not hinder adoption in open-source projects. AVIF is an image file format that uses AV1 compression algorithms. AV1 was succeeded by AV2 on 28 May 2026.