AV1 vs HEVC Comparison: Which One is Better?

AV1 – Much Newer Codec

AV1 is a next-generation video compression tech designed to supersede VP9 codec and compete with HEVC. Different from HEVC, AV1 is an open and royalty-free video coding format requiring no licensing fees. It also has a quite powerful group of members including Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Google, Mozilla, Tencent, ARM, IBM, Netflic, Cisco, Intel and NVIDIA (NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX™ 30 Series GPUs has added AV1 hardware decoding support.) as the founding members.

The main advantages of AV1 codec are open source, great interoperability, CPU-saving, bandwidth-saving, compatibility to devices and high-quality video transmission. The main shortcoming is that it is quite new to be not that stable when encoding and decoding.

The container format for AV1 is said to be Webm.

AV1

AV1 is the product of AOMedia (Alliance for Open Media) which includes Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix as the first seven founding members, and Facebook, Samsung, Apple, Tencent, ARM, IBM and Nvidia appear in this list one after another. There are also some promoter members like Adobe, AMD (AMD RX 6000 Series GPUs will support the AV1 codec soon), BBC, Vimeo, Hulu, VideoLan, Bitmovin and Vidyo.

AV1

AV1 is the product of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), which was founded in 2015. In June 2018, the 1.0 specification for AV1 was published by AOMedia. Because it is quite new and more sophisticated, the market adoption of it is not as wide as HEVC. However, you can still find some big names starting supporting AV1. For example, Netflix began streaming AV1 videos on its Android app in Feb, 2020. YouTube updated its AV1 test playlist on Oct. 30, 2019 and since then a vast number of YouTube videos including 8K videos have been encoded with AV1. As for browsers, support for the AV1 codec is available from Google Chrome version 70 which is released in mid-October 2018, and the AV1 support of Firefox starts in Firefox 67. Operating system includes Android 10 released in September 3, 2019, and software includes media player 5KPlayer which adds support for AV1 decoding in March, 2020.

AV1

The main aim of AV1 codec is to bring a higher compression rate to UHD 4K, HDR and 8K videos with higher resolution and higher bitrate, thus to help save the bandwidth but in faster speed and higher quality even under an unstable connection. The compression rate is said to reach from 30% to 50% better than VP9 and HEVC and finally replace them in the market. Besides, it also helps accelerate the live streaming.

AV1

The adoption to AV1 codec continues covering online streaming services (Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook), browsers (Chrome and Firefox), encoders (rav1e, SVT-AV1, Visionular Aurora encoder, Cisco encoder, EVE encoder, Millicast encoder and NGCodec encoder), decoders (dav1d, Windows 10 AV1 Video Extension, Windows 10 AV1 Hardware-accelerated video support, Google's LIBGAV1 and LG new 8K TV), OS (Android 10) and Media Players (5KPlayer and VLC) as of now.

AV1

Realtime for a live stream: AV1 is not that ideal

CPU usage: On May 29, 2020, I have tested the 1080p playback of an AV1-encoded YouTube video on Chrome on my Gigabyte computer powered by a 800MHz AMD Athlon CPU, and the result suggests the playback consumed about 20%~30% CPU usage. (The video I test: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ldaQLGOoJW0)

Bandwidth saving: AV1 will save up to 30% for the same image quality in HEVC and the percent is predicted to 50%. At lower bitrates, the video streaming quality is still high.

AV1 (compared to HEVC)

* Open source & royalty-free
* Higher compression efficiency
* Data conservation & bandwidth saving
* Faster transmission
* Higher quality
* Greater compatibility