Why Must Buy Android TV Box That Support AV1 Decoding

AV1 is the next generation of video coding standards. In order to be compatible with future video coding, when you buy an android tv box, you must buy an android tv box that supports AV1 decoding.

What Is AV1 Decoding?

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia),^[2] a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec.^[1] In 2018, Facebook conducted testing that approximated real world conditions, and the AV1 reference encoder achieved 34%, 46.2% and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 high profile, and x264 main profile respectively.

Purpose Of AV1 Decoding

The organization that does AV1 is called Alliance for Open Media, the Open Video Alliance. Probably I started working on AV1 in September 2015. AV1 is literally the first generation video encoder made by the AOMedia Alliance. The AV1 board’s definition and expectation of AV1 is that AV1 is an open and collaboratively developed encoder. In addition, it is a bandwidth-optimized encoder adapted to the Internet and different devices, and the complexity of decoding needs to be relatively low. And because of the need for industrialization, AV1 must quickly become a stable, efficient, real-time decoding encoder.

The AOMedia member list includes various influential companies, including Apple, Amazon, AMD, Arm, Broadcom, Facebook, Google, Hulu, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, NVIDIA, Realtek, Sigma, etc. These companies either control a huge ecosystem by themselves or develop chips that are used by hundreds of millions of customers around the world. Their support will ensure widespread adoption of AV1 in the next ten years. At the same time, AOMedia has begun to develop AV2, which is the continuation of the AV1 codec.

Current Status Of AV1

There is a lot of support now. Chrome and Firefox do support it. If you want, you can visit the YouTube page and watch the AV1 video. Both VLC and FFmpeg support it. Of course, in terms of operating systems and hardware, all of this is still in the testing phase, but most companies are working on it.

However, this has not yet been widely adopted. In fact, if you know that it has been more than a year, I would be surprised. For video codecs, it always takes time until it is more widely adopted, but it is happening. It started and it looks good.

Google have require AV1 codec support on all new Android TV devices starting March 31.