Google could impose AV1 for Android 14… and Apple doesn’t even support it

According to XDA-DevelopersGoogle might force AV1 codec decoding with Android 14, which Apple does not support at all.

AV1, a modern codec

The AV1 — for AOMedia Video 1 — is a free codec that does not require any royalties. It was developed as the successor to VP9 (powered by Google) and as an alternative to HEV (H.265), another widely used modern codec. AV1 is considered better than HEVC: its creators say it is up to 30% more efficient. And the codec has already been widely used for a few years: Google (with YouTube) or Netflix, for example, offer a lot of videos encoded in AV1.

Apple does not support it

For users of Apple products, however, the situation is quite simple: AV1 is not supported. The OS tools do not handle the codec and the Apple chips do not decode it hardware. To play videos in AV1, it is obviously possible to go through Firefox, Google Chrome or VLC, but they all include a software decoder which is less efficient from an energy point of view than a hardware decoder. What’s more, this solution is processor dependent and therefore requires a fast CPU for 4K or 8K videos.

This lack of support is not set in stone: Safari accepts images in AVIF, which is the “still image” version of the codec (in the same way that HEIC is the equivalent of the HEVC codec). Similarly, macOS Ventura integrated a plugin for software decoding (AV1DecoderSW.bundle).

As expected, Safari will be able to display AVIF images on macOS Ventura and iOS 16

Hardware or software decoding?

Coming back to Android, a question arises: will Google impose hardware or software decoding? Currently, support remains quite limited in smartphone chips, and one of the major SoC vendors (Qualcomm) only supports AV1 since Snapdragon 8 Gen. 2. This is the latest chip, and it is expected to feature in high-end smartphones in 2023.

Among other manufacturers, support varies: Amlogic (specializing in chips for TV boxes) supports it, as does Google with its Tensors and Samsung with its Exynos 2100 and 2200. In the PC world, Nvidia has it. integrated into its GeForce since the RTX 3000, Intel in its Xe chips and AMD in its RDNA 2 GPUs. hardware decode AV1 while the M1 and M2 chips seem incapable of doing so.

Given the market, we can therefore assume that Google should be content with a software decoder, possibly with the possibility that hardware decoding is imposed only for new products and not for updated ones, to avoid leaving aside millions of smartphones.