Firefox finally gets proper AV1 support. Neuwin noticed that Mozilla closed a two year old bug report asking about the feature, with AV1 hardware decoding scheduled for Firefox 100 release in May 2022.
Added Firefox software decoding of the AV1 codec in 2019. Software decoding is slow and uses a lot of power, but it’s better than not being able to see a video at all. Hardware decoding makes AV1 playback a top-notch citizen in Firefox, allowing for faster, more power-efficient playback supported by your GPU (assuming you have up-to-date hardware). For GPU accelerated AV1 playback, you will need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series card, an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, or an 11th Gen Intel CPU with Iris Xe graphics.
AV1 is the internet’s next big video codec. While some tests show that the newer AV1 codec does compress video
30 percent
is more efficient than the competing H.265 standard, what’s really important for adoption is that AV1 is free while H.265 has license fees. AV1 can trace its roots back to Google; The codec is the successor to Google’s VP8 and VP9 codecs, but development is now under the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance consists of most of the major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung. Chrome and Edge already support AV1 hardware decoding, with Safari being the main holdout (although Apple is in the alliance).
With this kind of corporate support, most video sites are working towards AV1 support, although PC and browser playback is probably the slowest area of adoption. YouTube relies heavily on AV1, building custom video transcoding hardware for data centers, and requiring support for the codec from smart TV licensees like Roku and Android TV. Netflix is a great sponsor from AV1 and delivers AV1 content to smart TVs and set-top boxes (but not browsers yet, as far as we can tell). Vimeo added support for AV1 in 2019while Facebook Codec support introduced in 2018.
Because all of these businesses can save money with AV1 through lower bandwidth costs and/or reduced license fees, AV1 will—eventually—be everywhere.
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