The world of digital video is preparing for a new milestone. After months of speculation and a delay from the originally planned date of late 2025, everything points to the AV2 codec, successor to AV1, being officially launched next week. Developed as a royalty-free and open-source standard, its arrival promises to improve compression and streaming efficiency.
Dav2d is already ready: the decoder paving the technical way 🚀
VideoLAN hasn't wasted any time. The organization has already released Dav2d, an open-source decoder for AV2 that works as its predecessor Dav1d did for AV1. This tool allows developers to start integrating support for the new format without waiting for its official launch. AV2 is expected to offer a bitrate reduction close to 30% compared to AV1, while maintaining the same visual quality, making it a strong candidate for streaming and video conferencing platforms.
The codec arriving just when your router couldn't take it anymore 😅
Finally, after we've all emptied our wallets on external hard drives to store 4K videos, AV2 arrives. They say it compresses 30% more, meaning you'll be able to accumulate twice as many episodes of that series you'll never watch. And since it's royalty-free, no one will charge you for seeing smaller pixels. It's all advantages, except that your 2015 computer will probably smoke trying to decode it.