May 2026

Ten years after AOMedia formed, AV1’s successor is frozen: specification and the AVM 1.0 reference implementation, with roughly 30% bitrate savings over AV1 in AOMedia’s own test conditions. The realistic clock starts now, though. AV1’s spec landed in 2018 and needed half a decade of hardware and browser work before it became a default; AV2’s road is the same length.

The paper behind the headline number: AV2’s common test conditions, including convex-hull adaptive-streaming configurations and user-generated content in the test set. The measured result is a BD-rate reduction of 29.8% on PSNR-YUV and 33.8% on VMAF in random-access configuration. Worth reading before quoting the 30%: codec gains always depend on how you score them.