We reported on the expected arrival of the new AV1 codec a couple of weeks ago (Get Ready for a New Codec) and now the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) officially released the AV1 specification. AOMedia said that the codec brings a 30% improvement in compression compared to HEVC. It is also royalty free.
“We expect that the installed base of 4K television sets to reach 300 million by the end of 2019 and therefore there is already latent demand for UHD services over today’s infrastructure. AV1 will be widely supported across the entire content chain, especially including services. We forecast rapid introduction of AV1 content delivery to help the widespread proliferation of UHD streaming,”
said Paul Gray, a Research Director at IHS Markit.
The codec is open source and the AV1 specification, reference code, and bindings are available for tool makers and developers to download here to begin designing AVI into products.
Specifically, the release of AV1 includes:
