Trouble with AV1 Videos on Your PC? A Comprehensive Guide to Enable and Watch AV1 Files on Windows & Mac

5KPlayer > Video Music Player > AV1 not Playing

Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links

If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

AV1 Can’t Play? How to Play AV1 on Windows 10/Mac?

Posted by Kaylee Wood | Last update: September 30, 2020 | 3 Min Read

AV1 not playing problem occurs simply because AV1 is such a brand new video codec that the 1.0 specification of AV1 was just published in June 2018, so there may be no perfect application at present to decode it very successfully. As a promising and royalty-free video codec with greater data conservation, faster transmission, higher quality and greater compatibility, AV1 video codec has attracted much attention from leading companies like Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and YouTube. That means more and more videos will be encoded with this kind of video codec in the near future and you’d better well know how to play AV1 video files in case needed.

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.

Jump to the Part to Find Corresponding Solution:
1. AV1 not Playing on Windows 10?
2. Can’t Play AV1 on Mac?
3. AV1 Playback Issues with VLC?
4. Best Free AV1 Video Player >>

AV1 not Playing on Windows 10? [Solved]

Trying to play AV1 video on Windows 10 with the native Windows 10 application but only receive an error message: “Can’t play. This item was encoded in a format that’s not supported. 0xc00d5212“?

As a matter of fact, Windows 10 doesn’t supply a native application which contains the required AV1 codec to support AV1 playback on Windows 10 as of now. To enable your Movies & TV app or Edge to open AV1 videos on Windows 10 successfully, you need to download Microsoft’s AV1 Video Extension to power the default media player.

Solution: Just open Microsoft Store, search for AV1 Video Extension and install it on your Windows 10 computer. After that, your Windows 10 computer has the inbuilt AV1 decoder to let Movies & TV app or Edge on Windows 10 to play AV1 video files.

AV1 not Playing on Mac? [Solved]

Though Apple joined the AV1 codec consortium earlier in 2018, it doesn’t mean devices like iPhone, Mac and Apple TV support AV1 video playback. In fact, because of the transition to 64-bit technology in macOS in 2019, you will see an alert when using iMovie about the media files that won’t be compatible with macOS Catalina. For sure, the incompatible video format includes AV1. As of now, you can only solve can’t play AV1 on Mac problem through converting AV1 to Mac compatible format like HEVC, H.264, MP4, etc if you want to play AV1 videos with the native Mac media player like QuickTime.

Solution: As the option to convert the incompatible files will no longer be available on macOS Catalina, you are highly suggested to detect and convert the incompatible video files using iMovie before upgrading to macOS Catalina, so as to make all of the video files compatible with the future versions of macOS. If the method mentioned above doesn’t works for you, you can try third-party video converter like WinX Video Converter to convert the AV1 file.

Obviously, the file you play on Mac now is a converted version which has a totally different video codec. To directly play video files encoded with AV1 codec without changing anything, you may need professional AV1 player to play AV1 on Mac and 5KPlayer is highly recommended.

AV1 Playback Issue with VLC

“VLC won’t play av1. The decoder seems to be struggling on higher bitrates. I don’t think using the nightly build made a lot of difference.”
“Trying to play Aomedia AV1 video codec in WebM container. VLC 3.0.3 can’t really figure out the codec, and fails. While v4.x nightly shows black screen, i.e. cannot decode the video.”

Even the quite new VLC 3.0.8 can’t play AV1 video files though VLC AV1 support has been added for a long time, some users said. When playing AV1 with the well-known and versatile VLC media player, sometimes it totally can’t play, sometimes the sound plays but no image appears. The fault is probably caused by the wrong version of VLC, or the wrong configuration of VLC.

Solution: Upgrade your VLC media player to the latest version 3.0.10 to see if it works. Or manually set the configuration to the right situation by unchecking the “Use hardware YUV -> RGB conversions” checkbox or set the Output to DirectX, Direct3D, Windows GDI or OpenGL. Or just switch to professional AV1 video player 5KPlayer.

AV1 not Playing? Try Free AV1 Video Player 5KPlayer

AV1 won’t play on Windows 10/Mac not only because AV1 video codec is new but also it is a heavier codec requiring more powerful media software to decode it. According to the test from Bitmovin, current AV1 codec offers about 20% and 30% better compression rate compared to VP9 and HEVC respectively, and it is predicted that the compression rate should be 50% better. What does that mean? It means that video encoded with AV1 will contain more details compared to the same size video encoded with VP9 or HEVC. And the media player for AV1 playback should be typically designed to meet the demand of playing videos with such high compression standard.

Based on the fact that there are seldom media players can support AV1 video playback out the market, 5KPlayer adds the AV1 decoding support in time in its latest version to satisfy your needs. On both Mac and Windows 10 computer, you can freely enjoy AV1 videos in 720p/1080p HD or 4K 30fps/60fps with crisp edges and high frame rates at the same time. Also, 5KPlayer’s support for AV1 hardware decoding is drawing near.

AV1 coding method is totally free, and 5KPlayer is the same which requiring no cost from you. You can feel free to download 5KPlayer to play AV1 video files on both Windows 10 and Mac without worrying about AV1 not playing problem. As a versatile media player , 5KPlayer also plays HEVC, H.264, VP9, MKV, MP4, MP3, etc files up to 4K and 8K. BTW, 5KPlayer’s download function will allow you to download AV1 videos and its DLNA function to stream AV1 videos from computer to smart TV wirelessly.