ONE CODEC TO RULE THEM ALL?L?
GIVEN THE UBIQUITY OF H.264, it’s a safe bet that it’s not going away any time soon. Smartphones, PCs, and laptops have all had good H.264 decoding support for a decade, and while newer codecs can improve video quality, companies aren’t in a huge rush to change their existing infrastructures. H.264 works, even if the quality for a given bitrate isn’t as good as what you get with newer codecs like HEVC and AV1. But there was a time when H.264 was still trying to gain traction, and it took at least five years from its inception until support really started to take off.
AV1 has the backing of some major names, and if it can avoid legal pitfalls and remain free to use, it’s the best current bet as the successor to H.264. Quality isn’t a huge jump from HEVC, but it doesn’t need to be. Once we start seeing lower-tier RTX 40-series graphics cards—and the RTX 4050 and 4060 are already shipping in laptops—plus AMD’s RX 7000 cards, more people could start to use it, and streamers in particular should appreciate the quality improvements that it affords at lower bitrates. But even while we’re just getting started with AV1 adoption, the video standards companies are already looking forward to what comes next. H.266 / VVC (Versatile Video Coding) hasn’t seen much support so far, even though the final standard was approved in 2020.
Maybe that will change. But with 8K TVs starting to come down in price, it’s a safe bet that we’ll continue to see plenty of advances in the realm of video codecs.