AV2
Open, royalty-free video coding format
AOMedia Video 2 (AV2) is an open, royalty-free video coding format developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a non-profit technology development consortium. It is the successor to their existing and widely deployed AV1 encoding format, and is designed to deliver better compression performance, enhanced support for AR, VR and split-screen usage and support for a wider visual quality range.
AV2 development work started in 2020, two years after the release of AV1. It was released on 28 May 2026.
AV2 uses an overall encoding framework that is similar to that of AV1, but with significant innovations in every part of that framework. These include extended recursive partitioning, changes to transform block partitioning, semi-decoupled partitioning of luma and chroma, improvements to intra-frame prediction including chroma from luma, and new modes for inter-frame prediction.
The Alliance for Open Media previously stated that AV2 will formally be released at the end of 2025, with hardware implementations expected in 2026. At CES 2026, VLC 4.0 was demonstrated playing AV2 on a MacBook Pro. On 9 June 2026 they announced AV2 in a blog post.
AV2 will compete with the royalty-based format VVC for adoption in the market, in a way similar to the competition between the earlier generation HEVC and AV1 formats. As of 2025, prototype AV2 implementations show around 30% lower bitrate over AV1 at similar visual quality, and AV2 is expected to offer similar performance to VVC overall.
01Adoption
Hardware
| Company | Chip/architecture | Type | Throughput | Ref |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allegro DVT | Pulsar D400 | Decoder IP core | 8K | |
| Chips&Media | WAVE63F1 | 8K@30fps | ||
| VeriSilicon | VC9800D | Decoder | 8K@30fps (single-core) and
8K@60fps (dual-core) |
Software
- AVM (AOM Video Model), reference software for AV2 format from Alliance for Open Media
- dav2d, AV2 decoder developed by VideoLAN targeted to be small, portable and very fast
02Patent claims
The Luxembourg-based non-practicing entity Sisvel announced plans in December 2025 to establish a patent pool, six months before AV2 was released, as it did for AV1.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “AV2”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- AV2 logo.svg by Alliance for Open Media, Public domain
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