AOMedia releases AV2 v1.0.0, hardware support (probably) still years away
AV2 full specification is now public.
AOMedia has published the final v1.0.0 specification for AV2, the next royalty-free video codec after AV1. The public AV2 page now lists “AV2 specification and reference code, v1.0.0” as the current release dated May 28, 2026.
This replaces the January 5 working draft that was covered earlier this year. We also covered the AVM 1.0.0 tag shortly before Computex , but the full public specification went live right before the show, which is why this follow-up is late.
AV2, free codec for modern video streaming
AV2 is designed for better compression than AV1. AOMedia says the codec targets streaming, broadcasting and real-time video conferencing. It also adds better support for AR and VR, split-screen delivery, screen content and a wider visual quality range.
AV2 is typically around 30% more efficient than AV1 for 4K, 8K, VR and other formats. An AOMedia-related technical paper also shows roughly 30% lower bitrate than AV1 in random access testing. This means the same visual quality could be delivered at a lower bitrate, or better quality could be sent at the same bitrate.
Source: AOMedia
We probably won’t have much to report on AV2 for a while now. AV1 was finalized in March 2018, but consumer hardware decode support only started to appear around 2020 with products such as Intel Tiger Lake, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series and AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series. AV1 hardware encoding took longer, with Intel Arc, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series and AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series arriving in 2022.
That gives AV1 about a two-year gap from final specification to first consumer decode hardware, and about four years before hardware encoding became available across major GPU vendors. AV2 could follow a similar path.
Source: AV2 1.0 Specs (AOMedia) , FlatPanelsHD
