Codec Showdown: A Deep Dive Into AV1 and HEVC’s Strengths for Optimal Video Quality

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AV1 vs HEVC Comparison: Which One is Better?

Written by Kaylee Wood | Last update: September 30, 2020 | 4 Min Read

Latest news: NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX™ 30 Series GPUs has added AV1 hardware decoding support, Windows 10 will get AV1 Hardware-accelerated video support this fall and AMD RX 6000 Series GPUs will also support the AV1 Codec.

In less than 10 years, we have witnessed 3 codec generations: VP8 and H.264, VP9 and HEVC, and AV1. With flying news about AV1 codec starting from 2015, it seems the transition from HEVC to AV1 will happen much faster than that from AVC/H.264 to HEVC/H.265.

AV1 codec , the brand new video codec, is designed to replace VP9 and compete with the current industry standard HEVC, and then dominate the video compression field in the near future as the final aim. As a royalty-free alternative to HEVC and supported by all major tech leaders including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, AV1 video codec seemingly has a brighter future compared to HEVC. Besides, it is said to have a better compression efficiency up to 30%~50% than that of HEVC. However, it is still too early to judge the performance of AV1 as there are no enough examples as of now to show the good potential of AV1 video codec.

Considering that you are interested in the benefits and disadvantages of AV1 and HEVC, this AV1 vs HEVC comparison article will give a brief explanation from different perspectives. And we will update it when there is any change of AV1 and HEVC.

Final words:

Though it is said that Apple’s support for AV1 means the demise of HEVC/H.265 adoption, it is still a long way for AV1 to dominate the market. However, it is inevitable to switch from HEVC to AV1 as there is in dire need of a technology that benefits both content creators and consumers, and AV1’s royalty-free status makes itself so competitive. As of now, if you want a free and next-gen video codec for saving cost and bandwidth, AV1 is the way for you to go. In contrast, HEVC should be the better choice if you need a real-time and low latency encoding.

Sources:

1. AV1 Wikipedia
2. HEVC Wikipedia

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