Tuesday, September 16th 2025
Next-Gen AV2 Video Codec Announced
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a global collaboration of innovators working together to define and deploy open standards that power the next generation of media experiences, today announced the upcoming launch of the next evolution in open video coding: AV2. Set for a year-end release, AV2 is not only an upgrade to the widely adopted AV1 but also a foundational piece of AOMedia's future tech stack.
AV2, a generation leap in open video coding and the answer to the world's growing streaming demands, delivers significantly better compression performance than AV1. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. AV2 marks a milestone on the path to an open, innovative future of media experiences.
"At AOMedia, we believe innovation thrives when it's open," said Dr. Pierre-Anthony Lemieux, Executive Director of AOMedia. "Our standards benefit from input from innovators worldwide and are developed under a royalty-free patent policy, bringing next-generation media experiences to more people, faster. We're excited to share AV2 with the world, as we continue to lead the way in shaping the future of media through open collaboration."
Survey Findings: Widespread Support of AV1 and Planned Adoption of AV2Permalink
In conjunction with its 10th anniversary, AOMedia released new member survey findings that underscore strong industry-wide support for its open innovation model and the widespread adoption of its technologies.
The survey found that 88% of members ranked AV1 as either "extremely critical" or "important" to their current or future product roadmaps. AOMedia's Adoption Showcase illustrates the real-world benefits members are achieving through AV1 deployment. Looking ahead, 53% of AOMedia members surveyed plan to adopt AV2 within 12 months upon its finalization later this year, with 88% expecting to implement it within the next two years.
Source:
AOMedia
AV2, a generation leap in open video coding and the answer to the world's growing streaming demands, delivers significantly better compression performance than AV1. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. AV2 marks a milestone on the path to an open, innovative future of media experiences.
Survey Findings: Widespread Support of AV1 and Planned Adoption of AV2Permalink
In conjunction with its 10th anniversary, AOMedia released new member survey findings that underscore strong industry-wide support for its open innovation model and the widespread adoption of its technologies.
The survey found that 88% of members ranked AV1 as either "extremely critical" or "important" to their current or future product roadmaps. AOMedia's Adoption Showcase illustrates the real-world benefits members are achieving through AV1 deployment. Looking ahead, 53% of AOMedia members surveyed plan to adopt AV2 within 12 months upon its finalization later this year, with 88% expecting to implement it within the next two years.
14 Comments on Next-Gen AV2 Video Codec Announced
It's also a point of excitement because this means the infra still dragging its feet on AV1 gets left behind.
As in, those CDNs won't matter by the time this AV2 technology finds its way into next gen accelerators.
My wildly spinning compass stops. The networks where I spend the most time will be quickly abandoned.
In place of them the few sites that were never considered home will become the flash point of discovery.
At least they're looking at AR/VR, meaning this might become a codec suitable for wireless headsets (assuming they have the ability to decode AV2).
All these viewers will know at most is A.) if the video stuttering, and B.) if they are using up lots of cellular data. They don't care if it was captured 10-bit or not and they will likely only care about how many channels of audio if they are streaming a movie or something and projecting it to a large screen TV. Whether it's AV1, HEVC, H.264, no (ordinary) person knows.
As always the adult entertainment industry are early adopters of new media technologies. Some of these services have been streaming AV1 content for quite a while. And yes there are sites that started streaming 8K content like a year ago.
YouTube is mainstream but not cutting edge. They are using AV1 today probably because 98+% of their smartphone-using audience has hardware AV1 decoding onboard. It's not like the users choose which codec to use.
In the same way, Joe Consumer doesn't know what codec was used in any given photo they are viewing, just that some move like video and some are still.
And the same with audio. Only dorkwads care about what bitrate a given stream is, blah blah blah. Joe Consumer just sees "lossless" and knows that's better than the regular stream. There's at least one audio geek here who starts mumbling into their echo chamber and starts posting diagrams with stepped curves, etc. Joe Consumer doesn't care about that. Might be interesting to dorkwads, it's certainly important to the engineers who encode streams for Apple Music, Spotify, TIDAL, etc. But that's like 0.001% of the planet if even that.
I would really like to see a detailed comparison showing the compression capability and image quality between AV2 and H.266.
You as the end user won’t be paying for the less than marginal licensing cost
So it really doesn't matter if they include the codec or not when it comes to price especially in Brazil with your crazy tax and import duty system
Community efforts have significantly advanced the quality of the SVT-AV1 encoder through community forks and upstreamed features making it higher quality than ever being able to handle grain using the HDR community fork (which also works just as well on SDR content)
VVC is going to remain niche as it's stuck with the same patent situation of HEVC (H.265), and being harder to encode while AV1 and AV2 are freely available to everyone and whose encoders will quickly improve due to the community and companies.
FFmpeg has added support for VVC coding, and you can already make any files with the Shutter Encoder app. It'll be visually lossless vs. an AVC source at less than 10% the bit rate. I've gotten a 96 second 768x576 24 fps AVC file that weighed 43.4 MB down to 6.79 MB in VVC without any visual degradation and preserving the same audio. However, it takes hours to encode just a few minutes of SD resolution video, even on a high end processor such as my 13900KS.Try it for yourself with the app I linked. It's an ffmpeg frontend.