AV1 Is Making Progress As A Royalty-Free Video Codec Based Off VP9

The Alliance for Open Media continues working hard on their first video codec, dubbed AV1, that started off with the VP9 libvpx code-base and are pursuing to do for free video codecs what the Opus codec has done for audio.

AV1 strives to be a viable open, royalty-free video codec suitable for Internet video and developed by Alliance for Open Media. AV1 is still hoping to succeed VP9 and be a viable contender to HEVC/H.265, but not until later in 2017 is the bitstream format expected to be finalized and thus not until 2018 when we may begin seeing some AV1 adoption.

At this weekend's FOSDEM event in Brussels there was a presentation on AV1. The presentation by Rostislav Pehlivanov covered the current status of the AV1 project and a bit about its future. For those wishing to learn about the technicals of the AOMedia AV1 video format can see the PDF slides from the 2017 FOSDEM presentation. The video recording should also be available soon.

The AV1 code for those interested continues to be hosted over at Google.