With the arrival of equipment capable of reproducing videos in 4k and 5k, they will be arriving in the coming months new and increasingly powerful codecs. An example of this is the AV1 codec, which started in 2015 and is more optimized than HEVC / H.265. In addition, it is a format with which the main players in the industry are in favor.
The codec developers, who are associated within the platform Alliance for Open Media, have among others Apple, as an inductor to get a high quality codec in a small space. This alliance was established in 2015.
To date, Apple has HECV present and Google, for its part, has VP9, but the Alliance for Open Media is looking for a common codec for the different operating systems. The task is not easy and requires a significant contribution of resources from the partners. But in their favor they want to get a one compression close to 20% if we compare it with HEVC. And as management of this task, we find the VideoLAN equipment (VLC) and FFmpeg.
And the first tool that they have made available to users is known as dav1d. The President of the Alliance, Jean Baptiste Kempf, explained in his blog that the decoder that takes advantage of all the benefits that AV1 has. On the part of the Dav1d developer, he wants efforts to focus on the conversion speed.
Macs are specially prepared to take advantage of the compression of this codec, since Intel CPUs are compatible since it works with Haswell in 2013. Now what they work on is the integration of the codec on all platforms, such as Firefox, which is working to integrate its services. But the rest of browsers do not want to be left behind and are looking for the best integration of AV1 in its services, achieving lower loads of resources in the emission of a video. Other platforms like Facebook they are evaluating integration with the project.
