How to enable Chrome browser AV1 video decoding support
Large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, and Netflix have completed the first version of the video compression technology AV1, the open source royalty-free AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification and the code hosted on Googlesource. The two mainstream modern web browsers, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, will soon support the AV1 open source video codec.
Google has introduced support for AV1 video decoding in Chrome 69. If you are using a Beta, Developer or Canary version, you can try enabling the new AV1 Video Encoder.
AV1 promises better compression than H.264, but the encoding speed is currently significantly slower. Even after the official release, AV1 must compete with mainstream codecs such as H.264 and H.265.
Chrome 69 does not enable AV1 video decoding support by default; you can manually allow it by following these steps:
Execute chrome://flags/#enable-av1-decoder in the address bar – change the “Enable AV1 video decoding.” option from the default “Default” setting to “Enabled.”
Google plans to promote AV1 support to all desktop (Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Chrome OS) Chrome and implement an official “bitstream” plan. Of course, the current development version of Chrome’s support for AV1 is still limited. At this time, only the Main 0 configuration file and ISO-BMFF (MP4) container decoding are supported, and encoding capability is not included.
