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YouTube moves to AV1 by default to the dismay of some Android users
Those with phones that lack hardware decoding have voiced battery concerns
As video continues to evolve, the demand for new technology to handle its complexity is growing. With the arrival of 4K video, for example, developers quickly became aware that existing video codecs like H264 were no longer going to cut it. To that extent, AV1 has started to become the popular standard for decoding and encoding on devices. Now, Google is ready to adapt to the changing times, and it will soon be reflected on YouTube.
Google, Apple, other Big Tech firms face antitrust investigation over AV1 license scheme
The European Commission is investigating how the codec was made and distributed
The Alliance for Open Media or AOM is a conglomerate mostly comprising familiar names from Big Tech that was founded in 2015 to build open-source video technologies and standards meant for the masses. This coalition is responsible for the one of the newest media formats on the block, AV1 — short for AOMedia Video 1 — offering significant upgrades over the VP9 and x264 codecs. But how AV1 is proliferating may be cause for trouble and major fines as European regulators have now confirmed a preliminary investigation into the group, specifically focusing on its licensing rules.
Mozilla is finally adding AV1 support to Firefox a full two years after Chrome and Edge
Better late than never?
If you have Chrome or Edge on a Windows 10 machine with an updated software package and great graphics support, you can probably run the AV1 video codec. As far back as 2020, Google and Microsoft were officially supporting hardware acceleration in their flagship browsers, but the Mozilla Foundation didn't make including AV1 video support in Firefox a priority because it requires PCs with up-to-date, more powerful hardware. According to Mozilla, that was just a small percentage of PCs.
Qualcomm will finally support native AV1 video decoding with its next-gen Snapdragon chip
Better late than never
AV1 is the video codec of the future, offering 30% better compression than Google's VP9 format without bringing any noticeable hit to picture quality. The compression benefits get even better as the resolution increases, resulting in significant data savings when streaming 4K or higher content. Google has been heavily pushing the open-source video codec, with Netflix also adopting AV1 for Android and smart TVs. Developed by the Alliance for Open Media, the AV1 codec can be used royalty-free by any company.
5 changes in Google Chrome 90 you need to know about (APK Download)
Default HTTPS, improved copy-and-paste, better AR models, and more
Read update
Google has just released Chrome 90 to the stable channel. There aren't too many UI changes or new features for us regular folks on the surface, but under the hood, Google has added a whole slew of improvements that you'll certainly notice over time. You'll get enhancements to copy-and-paste, better AR models, and support for a new codec that uses less bandwidth during video conferences.
Some very lucky Android TV owners can now stream YouTube in 8K
In other news, can someone lend me an 8K TV?
There are 8K Android TVs out there and a decent selection of 8K content on YouTube. But up until recently, the streaming cap on the YouTube app for Android TV was 4K. Not anymore, though.
AV1 is the hot new video codec on the block, offering around 30% better compression than Google's VP9 standard without a noticeable loss in picture quality. With Chrome and Android now supporting the format natively, many services have started to switch to it, and now Netflix is joining the fun.
Google is a leading member of the 'Aliance for Open Media,' a group of companies working to create a successor to VP8/VP9 (both used in WebM video), called AV1. AV1 is designed to be more compressed than VP9 while still retaining good video quality. Google announced today that Android Q will include native support for AV1, paving the way for more widespread use.
Chrome 69 was a massive update, as it brought a brand new interface to both desktop and mobile. Chrome 70 isn't as radical of a change, but it includes a few important new features, like support for the AV1 video codec and TLS 1.3.
Testing by Facebook engineers found that the Alliance for Open Media's new video codec, AV1, outperforms widely-used standards like the x264 and VP9 codecs, Facebook announced in a post on its engineering blog this week. While AV1 exhibits better compression, videos do take longer to encode with the new format.
Like any organization set up by the Joint Development Foundation, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a group of companies set up to collaborate on the introduction of a technological standard. In the case of AOMedia, its purpose is specifically to accelerate the development and adoption of a new video compression codec called AV1.