Convert AV1 Online Free

About AV1

Convert AV1 video to and from other formats in your browser, with all processing done locally on your device.

What AV1 is

AV1 is a video codec with two defining properties: it compresses very well, and it is royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media, a consortium of large technology companies, finished it in 2018, and the royalty-free part was the point. HEVC compresses well too, and it carries licensing costs that AV1 deliberately does not.

The efficiency comes from a handful of techniques working together: better prediction between frames, block partitioning that can go large or stay small as the picture needs, and improved transforms. What that adds up to matters more than the mechanism. AV1 beats H.264 by a clear margin and HEVC by a smaller one, so you either ship a smaller file at the same quality or a better picture at the same bit rate. Streaming services did the arithmetic and switched.

Strengths and limits

Efficiency and freedom, in that order. AV1 makes very small files for the quality it delivers, and being royalty-free it carries no per-use licensing cost at all. For anyone streaming at scale those two facts compound: less bandwidth per viewer, and no fee per stream.

Encoding is the expensive part. AV1 takes considerably more computation than older codecs to produce, so what used to be a quick export is not quick any more. Decoding is better than it was, since recent devices handle it in hardware, but hand an AV1 file to older hardware and playback stutters. Support is spreading quickly without being everywhere yet.

Origin and Evolution of AV1

AV1 came out of the Alliance for Open Media, a group that formed in 2015 with Google, Mozilla and Microsoft among its members, and the codec was finished in 2018. The problem they were solving was money as much as engineering. Streaming video was growing fast, bandwidth cost real money, and the codecs that compressed well, H.264 and HEVC, came with licensing fees attached. AV1 had to beat both on compression and charge nothing.

Getting it standardised took a lot of cross-checking against real platforms and devices, which is the unglamorous half of shipping a codec. Encoders and decoders followed: libaom first, then rav1e. After that the growth came from the obvious direction. Internet video kept climbing, browsers and players added support, streaming services worked out what the bandwidth saving was worth, and AV1 became the sensible default for shipping a lot of video efficiently.

Using AV1 Effectively

Two reasons to pick AV1: it squeezes files down hard, and it costs nothing to use. No royalties, no per-use licence. That combination is why it shows up in web streaming and anywhere bandwidth is the constraint. In practice you are either encoding for a platform like YouTube or putting AV1 into a media player. Chrome and Firefox play it without complaint. Older devices are the catch, because many have no hardware acceleration for it and playback suffers.

Expect old devices to choke. That is the main thing to plan around when you convert to or from AV1. FFmpeg does the work, but update your libraries first, because AV1 support moved quickly and an old build will disappoint you. Encoding is slow compared with the formats you are used to, so the quality and file-size settings are worth a few test runs rather than a guess. Then play the result on the actual device it is meant for, especially if that device has no hardware decoder and is doing it all in software.

Working with AV1 video

You will meet AV1 increasingly in streaming video and modern web content, often inside a WebM or MP4 container.

If the target is an older device, convert AV1 to H.264 in an MP4 container and accept the bigger file. Keep AV1 for the cases where the efficiency is worth something and you know the devices can play it.