# AV1 48 Hacker News commenters recommended AV1 and 22 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Open, royalty-free video codec with higher compression than H.264 and H.265 and growing hardware support. Caveat: patent claims by others and heavy encoding compute remain concerns. ## Why people recommend it - Better compression than H.264 and H.265 (6 comments): "AV1 matches or exceeds H.265 in compression efficiency, so for greenfield projects there's little reason to reach for the legacy codecs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47307702)) "AV1 delivers higher compression efficiency for 4K and 8K videos, reducing bandwidth costs without sacrificing quality." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45906287)) "I have re-encoded H.265 to AV1 and not only gotten smaller files that playback better on low-end hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347170)) - Royalty-free and open standard (7 comments): "This is why we have av1, ogg, etc. with most of the hard research re-done just to sidestep those pesky patents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222125)) "The industry has clearly aligned behind AV1 as a universal, open, royalty-free image/video distribution format" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46122463)) "focus on royalty-free video formats like VP9, AV1, and the future AV2" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009494)) - Wide and growing support (4 comments): "AV1 is quickly becoming the ubiquitous codec with the closest rival VVC offering little to offset the licensing troubles" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169912)) "go with AV1 for higher efficiency. It's currently the best and already pretty widely supported." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50292610)) "Lots of hardware supports it and you don't need hardware support for many other cases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291778)) - Decodes well on older devices (3 comments): "I have re-encoded H.265 to AV1 and not only gotten smaller files that playback better on low-end hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347170)) "AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291959)) "software encoding was perfectly fine, even on mobile" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343719)) ## What people warn about - Patent claims still possible (4 comments): "Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648089)) "AV1’s open, royalty-free promise in question as Dolby sues Snapchat over codec" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633595)) "It's only royalty free from AOM, it doesn't mean it isn't patent encumbered." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46229195)) - Heavy compute for encoding (3 comments): "AV1 is still prohibatively expensive both for the server and clients for software encoding/decoding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48348099)) "The problem with AV1 is it requires a massive amount of compute resources." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618811)) "AV1 and friends are usually too heavy in those settings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946399)) - Weak support on low-power devices (3 comments): "Some Sony TV's only hardware accelerate AV1 content through streaming services, and not through Blueray and USB" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46217036)) "seems its difficulty for long time to be played on low power devices hindered its adoption" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46157313)) "the majority of devices still don't have AV1 hardware decoding support" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47630945)) - Encoder over-flattens and looks worse (3 comments): "Publicly-available AV1 encoders (still) have a tendency to over-flatten anything that is low-contrast enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158007)) "AV1 is still worse in practice than H.265 for high-fidelity (high bitrate) encoding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214384)) "AV1 would most likely result in slower encodes that look worse." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227106)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [SVT-AV1 encoder](https://hackerapproved.com/p/svt-av1.md): 11 recommend - [x265](https://hackerapproved.com/p/x265.md): 7 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "AV1", https://hackerapproved.com/p/av1-video-codec/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).