HandBrake Video Transcoder Adds Official AV1 Codec Support in Latest Version

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Hardware and software support for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has grown steadily over the past two years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding are becoming the norm in more and more GPUs, phone SoCs and other hardware, while video streaming services like YouTube and Netflix have started streaming video encoded in AV1 on devices that support them.

Open source software projects are also starting to follow. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) package has extended its AV1 capabilities in recent versions, and now the HandBrake video transcoding app has added AV1 support as well. Version 1.6.0, released yesterday, added support for AV1 video encoding using the processor-based SVT-AV1 software encoding as well as via Intel's AV1-compatible QuickSync video encoder. included in its Arc GPUs.

The latest RTX 4000 and RX 7000 series GPUs from AMD and Nvidia also include hardware encoding support for AV1, but the software needed to use it has not yet been integrated into HandBrake .

AV1 is an open source video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that includes industry heavyweights like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Intel and Microsoft. Like the H.265/HEVC codec, AV1 enables much more efficient video compression than the older H.264 codec, allowing streaming of 4K and HDR video without requiring a massive increase in bandwidth over 1080p video. Unlike HEVC, AV1 codec support can be added to almost anything without paying royalties.

As of this writing, HEVC's main advantage over AV1 is that it has much wider support than AV1 across many generations of hardware from most major manufacturers. Roku supports AV1 decoding in some of its high-end streaming devices, but was reportedly pushed back against Google when the company tried to force Roku to support AV1 decoding across its entire lineup. Apple's AV1 plans are also murky - the company is a member of the AOMedia group and rudimentary AV1 support recently appeared in its developer documentation, but hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding and encoding is not. supported or have not been enabled in its latest Apple Silicon chips.