AV2 Video Standard Lands, But Practical Use Is Years Away

AV2 v1.0 final spec has released, and so has dav2d, the reference decoder. HN is clear-eyed about the timeline: the encoder runs at roughly 1fps on good hardware today, making it unusable in production until around 2028 at the earliest. The spec offers roughly 25% compression improvement over AV1, but AV2 decoding is five times more complex than AV1 decoding, which means hardware support will lag significantly.

The bigger concern threading through multiple comments is patent exposure. AV1 was designed to be royalty-free but got hit by Sisvel and Dolby patent pools anyway, with Dolby attacking Snapchat for AV1 usage. Nobody has a clear answer for how AV2 avoids the same fate, and the silence on that question is notable.

For anyone building video infrastructure today, AV1 remains the right bet for the next several years. AV2 is a spec worth knowing about but not worth planning around.