AV1 Video Is Eating the Internet: What It Means for Your Video Files

AV1 is replacing H.264 and H.265 across YouTube, Netflix, and Android. Learn how AV1 compares, when to convert your videos, and what browser support looks like in 2026.

Published April 13, 2026 · Updated March 25, 2026

If you have watched a video on YouTube in the last year, there is a very good chance it was delivered to your device using AV1. The same is true for Netflix on most modern hardware, for video calls on Google Meet, and for an increasing share of every video stream crossing the internet. AV1 has moved from an ambitious open-source project to the dominant next-generation video codec in a remarkably short time, and its momentum is only accelerating.

For most people, this shift has been invisible. You did not get a notification. Your videos did not suddenly look different. But behind the scenes, the codec powering your video consumption has been quietly replaced — and understanding that change matters if you work with video files in any capacity, whether you are a content creator, a web developer, or someone who just wants their home videos to take up less storage.

Here is what AV1 is, why it is winning, and what it means for your video files going forward.

What AV1 Actually Is

AV1 stands for AOMedia Video 1, and it was developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium that reads like a who's-who of the tech industry: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Meta, Mozilla, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many others. The project launched in 2015, and the first version of the specification was finalized in 2018.

The most important thing to understand about AV1 is that it is royalty-free. Unlike H.265 (also called HEVC), which is encumbered by a complex web of patent licensing from multiple patent pools, AV1 can be used by anyone without paying licensing fees. This single fact explains more about AV1's rapid adoption than any technical benchmark ever could.

H.265 was supposed to be the successor to H.264, the codec that powered the HD video revolution. Technically, H.265 is excellent — it achieves roughly 50% better compression than H.264 at equivalent quality. But its licensing situation became so fragmented and expensive that many of the biggest players in tech refused to adopt it widely. Google never added H.265 support to Chrome for years. Mozilla never added it to Firefox. Instead, they bet on AV1.

That bet has paid off.

How AV1 Compares to Other Codecs

Understanding where AV1 fits requires knowing the landscape it entered.

AV1 vs H.264

H.264 (also known as AVC) has been the backbone of internet video for nearly two decades. It is the most compatible video codec in existence — virtually every device manufactured in the last 15 years can decode it. It works everywhere, it is well-understood, and encoding tools for it are extremely mature.

But H.264 is old, and it shows. At the same visual quality, AV1 produces files that are roughly 30-50% smaller than H.264. For a 1080p video that would be 500 MB in H.264, AV1 can achieve the same perceived quality at 250-350 MB. At 4K resolutions, the savings are even more dramatic because AV1's advanced prediction tools work better with more pixel data.

The trade-off has historically been encoding speed. H.264 encoders are blazingly fast because they have had 20 years of optimization. AV1 encoding has been slow — sometimes 10 to 50 times slower than H.264 for equivalent quality. This is changing rapidly, but it remains AV1's most significant practical limitation.

AV1 vs H.265 (HEVC)

H.265 and AV1 are much closer competitors. Both represent the same generational leap beyond H.264, and in raw compression efficiency, they are remarkably similar. Independent benchmarks show AV1 edging out H.265 by about 10-20% in compression efficiency, though the gap varies depending on the content type and encoder settings.

The real difference is not technical — it is economic and strategic. H.265 requires licensing fees. AV1 does not. This is why YouTube uses AV1 instead of H.265 for most playback. It is why Netflix has invested heavily in AV1 encoding. It is why Android adopted AV1 as a required codec. The licensing issue has effectively decided the winner in this comparison, regardless of what the compression benchmarks say.

AV1 vs VP9

VP9 was Google's previous open-source codec and the direct predecessor to AV1. It offered roughly H.265-level compression without the licensing baggage, and YouTube used it as their primary codec for years before AV1 was ready.

AV1 improves on VP9 by approximately 20-30% in compression efficiency. VP9 served its purpose as a bridge technology, but AV1 is its clear successor. YouTube has been steadily migrating playback from VP9 to AV1, and VP9 is now effectively in maintenance mode — still supported everywhere, but no longer the target for new optimization work.

Who Is Using AV1 Right Now

The list of AV1 adopters reads like a map of the internet's most bandwidth-intensive services.

YouTube

YouTube has been the single largest driver of AV1 adoption. They began serving AV1 streams to compatible devices in 2020 and have steadily expanded coverage since. By 2026, AV1 is the default codec for most YouTube playback on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Android, smart TVs, and streaming devices. YouTube's motivation is straightforward: they serve over a billion hours of video per day, and even a 20% reduction in bandwidth per stream translates to massive infrastructure savings.

Netflix

Netflix was one of AV1's earliest champions and a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media. They use AV1 for streaming on Android, smart TVs, game consoles, and their desktop web player. Netflix's encoding pipeline uses per-title optimization, which means each piece of content is encoded with settings tailored to its specific visual characteristics. AV1's flexibility makes it particularly well-suited to this approach.

Android and Mobile

Starting with Android 13, AV1 hardware decoding became a requirement for new devices. This was a critical inflection point because hardware decoding means AV1 playback is power-efficient — your phone's battery does not drain faster when watching AV1 video compared to H.264. By 2026, the vast majority of active Android devices support AV1 hardware decoding, which has removed the last major barrier to mobile AV1 adoption.

Apple added AV1 hardware decoding with the A17 Pro chip in 2023, and the M3 Mac chips included it as well. Every iPhone and Mac released since has included AV1 hardware support, bringing Apple's ecosystem fully into the AV1 era.

Video Conferencing

Google Meet switched to AV1 for video calls on supported hardware, and other platforms have followed. Video conferencing is an interesting use case because it requires real-time encoding — you cannot spend minutes optimizing each frame. AV1's real-time encoding performance has improved enough to handle this, though it typically uses lower-complexity encoding modes than what streaming services use for pre-recorded content.

Encoding Speed: The Elephant in the Room

AV1's biggest practical weakness has always been encoding speed. The reference encoder, libaom, was designed for quality research rather than speed, and early versions were almost comically slow — encoding a single minute of 1080p video could take hours.

This situation has improved dramatically thanks to alternative encoders built for practical use.

SVT-AV1

Developed by Intel and Netflix, SVT-AV1 is now the go-to AV1 encoder for most production workflows. It offers a wide range of speed presets, from extremely slow (maximum compression) to fast enough for near-real-time encoding. At its faster presets, SVT-AV1 encodes 1080p content at roughly 2-5x slower than a fast H.264 encode — still slower, but no longer impractically so.

rav1e

Mozilla's Rust-based AV1 encoder focuses on safety and correctness. It is not the fastest option, but it is well-suited for automated pipelines where reliability matters more than raw throughput.

Hardware Encoders

This is where the speed story gets genuinely exciting. NVIDIA's NVENC added AV1 encoding support starting with the RTX 40-series GPUs, and Intel's Arc GPUs include dedicated AV1 encoding hardware. AMD followed with AV1 encoding in their RDNA 3 architecture. Hardware AV1 encoding is fast — comparable to H.264 hardware encoding — though it typically does not match the compression efficiency of a slow software encode.

For content creators, hardware AV1 encoding means you can export an AV1 video from your editing software in roughly the same time it would take to export H.264. The file will be smaller, and the quality will be at least as good.

Browser Support in 2026

AV1 video playback is supported in every major browser:

  • Chrome — full support since Chrome 70 (2018), including hardware acceleration
  • Firefox — full support since Firefox 67 (2019)
  • Safari — added in Safari 17 (2023) for devices with hardware AV1 decoding
  • Edge — full support, inherited from Chromium

Global browser support for AV1 video playback is now above 93%, and the remaining percentage consists primarily of older devices and outdated browser versions that are declining month over month.

The one nuance is hardware decoding. Software-based AV1 decoding is CPU-intensive and can drain laptop batteries quickly. On older machines without hardware AV1 decoders, playback of 4K AV1 content can be stuttery. This is primarily a concern for pre-2022 hardware, and it is becoming less relevant every month as older devices cycle out.

When Should You Convert Your Videos to AV1

Not every video needs to be AV1. Here is a practical framework for deciding.

Convert to AV1 When

You are storing archival video and want to minimize file size. If you have a library of personal videos, home movies, or project archives that sit on a hard drive, re-encoding them to AV1 can reduce storage consumption by 30-50% compared to H.264 with no visible quality loss. This is a one-time cost in encoding time that pays dividends in storage savings.

You are publishing video to the web. If you run a website and serve self-hosted video (not YouTube embeds), AV1 in a WebM or MP4 container gives you the smallest files with the widest browser support. You can offer an H.264 fallback for the shrinking number of browsers that do not support AV1.

You are distributing video files and bandwidth matters. Sending a 500 MB H.264 file versus a 300 MB AV1 file makes a real difference when you are sharing via email, cloud storage, or limited-bandwidth connections.

Stick with H.264 When

Maximum compatibility is non-negotiable. If you are sending a video to someone and you have no idea what device or software they will use, H.264 in an MP4 container remains the safest choice. It plays everywhere, on everything, without exception.

You need fast encoding turnaround. If you are in a production environment where encoding speed matters more than file size — live events, quick-turnaround editing, real-time applications — H.264 hardware encoding is still faster and more reliable across a broader range of hardware.

You are working in a professional editing pipeline. Most video editing software handles H.264 and ProRes natively. AV1 support in editing workflows is improving but is not yet universal. Encode to AV1 as a final delivery step, not as your working format.

How to Convert Video to AV1

Converting existing videos to AV1 is straightforward. Browser-based tools like Fileza handle the conversion entirely on your device — your video files never leave your machine, which matters if you are working with personal or sensitive content.

For the best results when converting to AV1, keep these principles in mind.

Choose your quality target carefully. AV1 is so efficient that you can often reduce the bitrate significantly compared to your H.264 source without any visible quality loss. Start conservative — encode at a quality setting that looks indistinguishable from the original — and only push further if you need smaller files.

Use the MP4 container for maximum compatibility. While AV1 works in both WebM and MP4 containers, MP4 has broader support across devices and players. Unless you specifically need WebM, MP4 is the safer choice.

Expect encoding to take time. Even with modern encoders, AV1 encoding is slower than H.264. A 10-minute 1080p video might take 5-15 minutes to encode to AV1 on a modern machine, compared to 1-3 minutes for H.264. Plan accordingly, especially for large batches.

The Future of AV1

AV1 is not standing still. The Alliance for Open Media is actively developing AV2, the next-generation successor that promises another significant jump in compression efficiency. But AV2 is still in the research phase, and AV1 has years of productive life ahead of it.

More immediately, AV1 hardware support continues to expand. Every new generation of smartphones, laptops, smart TVs, and streaming devices includes dedicated AV1 decode (and increasingly, encode) hardware. Within a year or two, the question of whether a device supports AV1 will be as irrelevant as asking whether it supports H.264 today.

The transition from H.264 to AV1 is not a cliff — it is a gradient. H.264 will continue to work everywhere for the foreseeable future, and nobody needs to panic about converting their entire video library overnight. But the direction is clear. AV1 is the present tense of internet video, and building your workflow around it is no longer early adoption. It is simply keeping up.

Key Takeaways

  • AV1 delivers 30-50% smaller files than H.264 and 10-20% smaller than H.265 at equivalent quality
  • It is royalty-free, which is the primary reason it has won industry adoption over H.265
  • YouTube, Netflix, Android, and Apple all use AV1 as a primary codec
  • Encoding speed has improved dramatically with SVT-AV1 and hardware encoders, though it is still slower than H.264
  • Browser support exceeds 93% globally and is climbing
  • Convert to AV1 for archival storage, web publishing, and bandwidth-sensitive distribution
  • Stick with H.264 when you need universal compatibility or fast encoding turnaround
  • Tools like Fileza let you convert video to AV1 entirely in your browser, with no upload required