Microsoft says new Windows 10 PCs will have AV1 hardware support
The Alliance for Open Media (AOM) is a consortium founded by Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, and Amazon in 2015. It focuses on the development of next-generation media formats, codecs, and technologies in the public interest. In 2018, AOM announced the public release of the free AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification, and now it is finally becoming the standard on PC.
Back in the past year, Microsoft released the AV1 Video extension to the Microsoft Store. This extension allows Windows 10 players to play videos that have been encoded using the AV1 video encoding standard. Microsoft has now announced that AV1 hardware decoding support will become the standard for new Windows 10 systems this fall with the latest GPUs.
These are 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. AV1 hardware acceleration in Windows 10 also requires operating system version 1909 or newer, the mentioned extension, a web browser, or a hardware-accelerated player for AV1. You may also need to install the latest graphics drivers.
According to Facebook engineers, AV1 can reduce bitrate by 50% at the same quality compared to H.264, and 30% compared to VP9. Moreover, the higher the resolution, the better the compression effect. The inclusion of hardware support for AV1 allows you to take advantage of the improved video codec by moving the decoding work from software to GPU. This is especially important for laptops as it helps to reduce power consumption.
It’s worth noting that Google has already added support for the AV1 hardware decoder to the Windows 10 Chrome browser and YouTube; work with Twitch is in progress; The alpha version of the Kodi player has got support for hardware acceleration AV1, the VLC player from VideoLAN will also soon receive it. It is also worth adding that AV1 is also advancing on the mobile front: most of the latest flagship SoCs for smartphones have received hardware video decoding units in this format. And Netflix began switching to the AV1 codec earlier this year to save bandwidth on Android. At the same time, the AOM consortium is already working on the AV2 standard.