The Alliance for Open Media, or AOMedia for short, appears to be inching closer to the final 1.0.0 release of the AV2 codec. At least, that’s what the group would have us believe with the latest repository update.
The more important point is that the finalised version of AV2 has seemingly received a release date, and that date is 29 May 2026.
“AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), building upon the success of AV1. Designed to deliver significantly improved compression efficiency, AV2 targets applications requiring high-quality video at lower bitrates, including streaming, broadcasting, and video conferencing.”
So, if it wasn’t already obvious, AV2 is set to be the successor to the current AV1 codec. The codec is similar to AV1: video data is split into small packets called OBUs, and OBUs are used in several tasks, including sequencing, timing, frame headers, tile data, and metadata.
On a sidebar, AV1 first came out in 2018, and was developed as a successor to VP9. Its encoding and decoding compression have the ability to conduct a 4K60fps stream at 8Mbps.
Getting back on point, the alleged release date and final specifications are the first tangible evidence we’ve had since last year. Originally, it was believed that AV2 would get its final release by the end of last year, but that has clearly come and gone.
On a related note, AOMedia still hasn’t published the full final specification of AV2, with only a draft for the codec’s Bitstream and Decoding Process Specification being available to the public. For that matter, final specification doesn’t necessarily mean that the codec will see immediate deployment. Take Discord as an example: the VoIP service only started rolling out support for the codec in 2023, nearly five years after the latter’s debut.
(Source: AOMedia via GitHub, Reddit, Videocardz)
