Netflix switches to royalty-free codec

Netflix announced on February 6 (local time) that it will adopt AV1 (AOMedia Video Codec 1.0), an open loyalty pro codec, for Android apps. Of course, it was also clear that it plans to adopt AV1 on all platforms, starting with apps for Android.

In addition to Netflix, AV1 is Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Mozilla. It is a video codec developed jointly by companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and NVIDIA, and was officially released in March 2018. Video compression standards include H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) and H.265 (HEVC). However, since all of them have complex licensing issues, they have to pay high license fees to adopt a product or service, and as a result, the price of the product or service increases. AV1 is royalty-free and has 20% higher compression efficiency than the existing VP9.

Netflix basically adopted the H.264 codec, but from 2016, it also supports VP9 through the smartphone download function. In addition, codec optimization was also conducted in 2018.

The AV1 decoder adopted for Android apps is dav1d developed by VideoLAN and is said to be optimized to play content that supports Netflix’s 10-bit color. Netflix said its goal is to distribute AV1 on all platforms. The AV1 compression efficiency is good for mobile phone networks with limited communication speeds with low reliability, and the video selected for users who want to use the download function to reduce mobile phone data usage. It says that it can be streamed with AV1.

However, although AV1’s playback load is small, it has the disadvantage of enormous computational cost for encoding time and compression rate, so it is important to support hardware for AV1 development. I am putting up my name. Netflix explained that it is working with device or chipset partners to further expand AV1. Related information can be found here .