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It would be great if AV1 was as ubiquitous as H.264. Apple is very much holding things back by insisting that Safari only support AV1 on devices with hardware decoding (M3 and higher), even though other browsers use software decoding just fine.

(Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)

"AV1 adoption is accelerating"

But before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild

With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?

Is there any consumer-level hardware available that supports AV1 encoding yet?

Great, another codec that makes old hardware obsolete through lack of hardware acceleration.

Anyone use AV1? How good is it? What are your thoughts on AV2?

The tech was surely locked down long ago if they're close to announcing, but just putting the dream out there that AV2 makes next-gen image compression more practical. AVIF's very effective at maintaining OK quality at low bitrates, but encoding at high quality on CPU (something like the common ~2bpp JPEG) was very slow. I think that slowed down adoption and was one of the reasons JXL still had a niche. Progressive mode would help for images too.

Another great thing JXL has is lossless recompression of .jpg files, which is a smaller improvement than a whole new format, but much easier to deploy. Saving 22% beats saving 0%. Harder, of course, to see how that one would connect to any of AOMedia's other priorities.

Totally different goal, but I wish there was a liberatory/non/less-encumbered form for realtime video production too.

A lot of good streaming hardware does jpeg-xs, ISO/IEC 21122, for real-time encoding basically from the camera to the mix station. It's still extremely high bit-rate mostly, but very low latencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS

This might be a response to H.266/VVC, which was finalized in 2020 but apparently saw limited adoption so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding

Is this intended to be competitive with h.266/VVC? And is it?

Wow