AV2 Official: The New Codec Cuts Bandwidth by 30%, but is 5 Times More Complex

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has finalized the release 1.0.0 of the AV2 specifications, the direct successor to the royalty-free AV1 codec. This crucial step paves the way for the development of optimized encoders and decoders on a finally stable standard, eliminating the risks of future incompatibility. The consortium's goal remains the same as in 2018: to counter the dominance of commercial licenses like H.265 (HEVC), but with drastically superior compression efficiency.

According to official assessments released by the consortium, AV2 guarantees a bitrate reduction of between 30% and 34% with equivalent visual quality compared to AV1. Tests based on PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) highlight how the new algorithm manages to maintain the level of detail while significantly reducing bandwidth requirements. This is a huge advantage for distributing heavy content in 4K, 8K, and HDR, which will allow streaming giants to reduce the distribution costs of content delivery networks. To achieve this generational leap, AV2 introduces advanced intra and inter-prediction tools, ultra-flexible partitioning, evolved motion models, and an updated entropy coding system.

The Current Bottleneck of AV2: Sky-High Computational Complexity

There is a huge downside. The incredible compression efficiency comes at the cost of sheer computational power. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, a key figure behind VideoLAN, has emphasized that the software decoding of AV2 is around five times heavier than that of AV1. This monstrous computational complexity makes software playback entirely impractical on the vast majority of processors currently on the market.

The transition to AV2 will therefore be tightly linked to the availability of dedicated hardware acceleration in next-generation GPUs, replicating the slow roadmap already seen with its predecessor. It’s worth noting that AV1 took years to find native support on graphics cards from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, prompting giants like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Video to adopt it widely only in very recent times.

AOMedia remains optimistic for the medium term, estimating that about 88% of its members will implement the AV2 specifications by the second half of 2027. Until then, the new codec will remain a deal for research labs and experimental hardware, while the current AV1 standard will continue to dominate the efficient streaming scene on consumer devices.