This article was updated on 21 November, 2025

HP and Dell recently disabled support for the HEVC/H.265 video codec in some laptops in order to avoid licensing costs. It’s a reminder of the importance of royalty-free codecs.

AV1 is an open-source royalty-free video codec created by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), a group founded by Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, and Intel. Apple is also a member. Work on AV2 is already underway, but hardware and software support for AV1 is still a work in progress. Let’s take a look…

Hardware support

The Google Pixel 10, released in August 2025, is the first smartphone to support recording video using AV1.

Decoding

Support for viewing AV1 videos is now ubiquitous on new devices.

The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, released in 2023, featured an AV1 hardware decoder. The following year, all versions of the iPhone 16 support AV1, including the budged 16e, had support.

Apple’s M3 chip brought support to Apple computers, which has continued with successive chips.

Hardware-accelerated encoding

While hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding is common on new devices, hardware-accelerated encoding remains rare (Intel Arc, GeForce RTX 40 are two of the only examples I could find, but there may be more).

Exporting AV1

Significantly, Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder do not support AV1 video exports. Motion graphics app Cavalry added support for AV1 export in 2025.

Browser support

Microsoft Edge belatedly added support for AV1 in January 2024. All web browsers now support AV1.