AOMedia has officially released AV2, its next-generation open video codec and successor to AV1. This follows the codec’s 1.0 milestone, confirming AV2 as the Alliance for Open Media’s next major royalty-free video compression standard.
AV2 improves compression efficiency over AV1, enabling higher quality at the same bitrate or reduced bandwidth with similar visual quality. Like AV1, it is developed under AOMedia’s royalty-free patent policy, guaranteeing alignment with the open media ecosystem used in browsers, streaming sites, and open-source tools.
To be clear: the announcement does not mean AV2 is immediately ready for broad use. It just marks the formal release of the specification, allowing work on implementations, containers, decoders, encoders, testing, and future hardware support to proceed.
AOMedia notes that AV2 expands on AV1 with features such as scalable bitstreams, multi-stream and multi-view video, stereoscopic content, multiple camera angles, and composite video within a single bitstream. The codec targets video-on-demand, conferencing, immersive media, and professional workflows.
Additionally, AOMedia states that conformance streams from Allegro and HDR Nova are available to help implementers test AV2 decoders. Work has also begun on a 12-bit professional profile for cinema and HDR workflows, highlighting AV2’s long-term potential past standard web video.
However, AV2 adoption will take time. Just for reference, AV1 took years to achieve widespread browser support, GPU decoding, encoder support, streaming platform adoption, and hardware acceleration. AV2 is now entering a similar early phase, with software support arriving before hardware support.
Currently, AV2’s release acts as a foundation rather than an immediate replacement for AV1. The specification is official, the reference implementation is available, and work on decoders and containers is ongoing. Broad adoption across browsers, media players, FFmpeg workflows, and consumer devices will follow.
For additional details, see the official announcement.
