Enlarge (credit: Alliance for Open Media)
Hardware and software support for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has been steadily building over the last couple years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding is becoming standard in more GPUs, phone SoCs, and other hardware, while streaming video services like YouTube and Netflix have begun serving AV1-encoded video to devices that support it.
Open-source software projects are beginning to follow suit, too. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) package has been expanding its AV1 capabilities in recent releases, and now the Handbrake video transcoding app has added AV1 support as well. Version 1.6.0, released yesterday, has added support for encoding AV1 video using both CPU-based SVT-AV1 software encoding as well as via Intel’s AV1-capable QuickSync video encoder included in its Arc GPUs.
Nvidia and AMD’s latest RTX 4000- and RX 7000-series GPUs also include hardware encoding support for AV1, but the software needed to use it