Hardware-accelerated AV1 video support will be available on new Windows 10 systems with the latest GPUs this fall. By enabling hardware support for AV1, all the workload of decoding would move from software to hardware, which should reduce power consumption and increase battery life on mobile devices. This helped users play videos on Windows 10 that were encoded using the AV1 video coding standard. Microsoft had released the AV1 Video extension in the Microsoft Store last year. It has the potential to deliver 4K UHD video at an average of 30-percent greater compression compared to other codecs.

AV1 or the AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 is a royalty-free specification and can be delivered across platforms. The codec was announced by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), a consortium founded by Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, and Amazon.

The AV1 codec offers better compression compared to the existing H.265 codec, and at the same time, it aims to reduce data usage when streaming videos online. Microsoft has officially announced that it is finally bringing hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec to Windows 10 later this year.

Video codec for windows 10