Handbrake video transcoder adds official AV1 codec support in latest release

Hardware and software support for the royalty-free video codec has been growing over the last couple years. Hardware-accelerated decoding is becoming standard in more hardware and streaming video services are serving it.

The open-source software projects are following suit. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) package has been expanding its capabilities in recent releases, and now the Handbrake video transcoding app has added a new feature. The latest version of the software has support for both SVT-AV1 software and QuickSync video encoders.

Hardware support for AV1 is included in the latest graphics cards, but the software needed to use it hasn't been built.

The Alliance for Open Media is a group that includes heavy industry hitters like Microsoft and Amazon. Unlike H.265/HEVC, which requires a massive increase in bandwidth to stream 4K and high definition video, the new AV1 allows for streaming of 4K and high definition video without the need for a huge increase in bandwidth. It's possible to add support for the AV1 codec without paying royalties.

As of this writing, HEVC's main benefit is that it is supported more widely by most major manufacturers. The company pushed back against the company when they tried to force them to support all of their products. The company is a member of the AOMedia group, but hardware-accelrated decoding and decoding isn't supported or hasn't been enabled.