AV1

AV1 arrived in 2018 as the industry's answer to licensing fees on H.265, backed by a consortium of the large technology and streaming companies. It compresses harder than what came before, roughly 20 to 30 per cent better than VP9 and considerably better again than H.264 at comparable perceived quality, which adds up fast at streaming scale. The costs are computational. Encoding is slow, and decoding needs hardware support, which reached most devices manufactured from around 2020 onwards. For an editor it is a delivery format, something a platform serves out to viewers, and rarely a sensible choice for a master export.