AV2 Is Final - What the New Codec Means for Your Videos

The Alliance for Open Media finished AV2 on 28 May 2026, and almost nothing you own can play it. Both of those things are completely normal, and worth understanding before anyone tries to sell you on it.

AV2 is the successor to AV1, from the same group of companies.

Early implementations point to roughly 30 percent lower bitrates than AV1 at comparable quality.

In plain terms, that means a file about a third smaller for the same picture.

What finished actually means

A codec being final does not mean it is available. It means the specification is frozen, so everyone building hardware and software is now working from the same document.

That is the starting gun, not the finish line. Until the spec settles, no chipmaker will commit a decoder block to silicon, because a late change would make the chip wrong.

So the announcement matters enormously to the industry and almost not at all to you, this year.

What can play AV2 today

Very little, and nothing you are likely to be using.

VLC 4.0 demonstrated AV2 playback at CES in January 2026, which follows the pattern AV1 set - VLC tends to arrive first because software decoding needs no new hardware.

Three companies have announced decoder designs for chipmakers to license: Allegro DVT, Chips&Media and VeriSilicon. Those are building blocks sold to manufacturers, not products you can buy.

How long this takes, based on AV1

AV1 is the best guide, because it went through exactly this.

The AV1 specification was released in 2018. It took until around 2022 for flagship phones to decode it in hardware, and until 2026 for roughly 80 percent of streaming-capable devices to manage it.

That is eight years from finished spec to ordinary. AV2 may move faster, because the industry is more practised now and the tooling exists, but it will not be quick.

What you should do about it

Nothing, and that is a real answer rather than a shrug.

AV1 is the format that actually arrived, and it is the one worth using for anything you encode today. It plays nearly everywhere and it is free of licence fees.

If you encode your own video, SVT-AV1 and the AOM AV1 Encoder are the two to reach for.

For playback it is already handled, because dav1d is the decoder most players rely on.

You can check what your own hardware decodes with our codec checker.

AV2 is not the only one waiting

H.266, also called VVC, finished in 2020 and is still barely present on consumer devices six years later.

Android only added VVC playback in 2026, and then only on hardware that already supports it. New codecs are slow in a way that surprises people every time.

If you want the longer view of where all of this is heading, we cover it in The Future of Video Codecs.

The short version

AV2 being final is genuine news for chipmakers and streaming companies, and a note in the calendar for everyone else. Check back when phones ship with it, which will not be this year.

Read how AV1 compares with H.265 if you are choosing a format today, or tell us if you have got AV2 playing on anything real.