Your network bill is creeping up, your object storage grows like it has feelings, and your CPUs are burning cycles on “background” media work that
nobody remembers approving. Meanwhile, product asks why a 20‑second clip takes three minutes to “process,” and why playback is fine on desktop but
choppy on a brand-new phone.
That’s a codec problem—whether or not you run a streaming platform. AV1 isn’t just a nicer way to watch videos; it’s a lever that changes egress,
storage footprint, pipeline architecture, and incident patterns. If you run production systems, AV1 will touch you. Possibly during a holiday freeze.
Why AV1 matters outside streaming
Most orgs don’t “stream.” They “have video.” Support uploads screen recordings. Marketing ships product demos. HR distributes trainings.
Security stores camera footage. DevRel posts webinars. Sales sends personalized clips. And every internal tool that accepts user-generated content
becomes a video platform the moment someone realizes that text boxes are optional.
Codecs quietly decide the shape of this mess:
- Object storage growth: video dominates bytes. A 20–40% size swing is the difference between “boring bill” and “why is this bucket a mortgage?”
- Egress costs and CDN bills: even “non-streaming” apps deliver media to browsers, mobile clients, and partner APIs.
- Compute budgets: encode time, thumbnail extraction, QA passes, and “just-in-case” transcodes sit on CPU/GPU like unpaid rent.
- Latency and user experience: codec choice changes startup time, rebuffering, and battery drain—then your support queue changes with it.
- Security and compliance: transcoding pipelines create new data copies, new retention complexity, and new failure points (especially in regulated environments).
AV1’s headline is “better compression.” The operational headline is: AV1 shifts cost from bandwidth/storage to compute and compatibility management.
If you plan that shift, you win. If you stumble into it, you get an incident report where the word “codec” appears for the first time.
Interesting facts and historical context
A codec is technology, politics, and economics in a trench coat. AV1’s backstory matters because it explains why it exists and why deployment is oddly uneven.
- AV1 was created by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium formed in 2015 to push a royalty-free codec ecosystem.
- AV1’s roots include Google’s VP9 and elements from other research codecs; it wasn’t a clean-slate invention so much as a strategic merge.
- AV1 bitstreams were finalized in 2018, but broad hardware decode took years—software can ship in a sprint; silicon ships on a calendar.
- Netflix and YouTube were early AV1 drivers because they feel compression gains as real money: less data moved, fewer cache misses, fewer congested last-mile links.
- AV1 is used not only for video files but also for real-time communication (e.g., WebRTC), where bitrate efficiency competes with latency and CPU.
- AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) uses AV1 intra coding for images, so “AV1 adoption” often sneaks in via image pipelines first.
- Hardware decode adoption accelerated with newer GPUs and mobile SoCs; the long tail of older devices still dictates fallback strategies.
- HEVC (H.265) and VVC (H.266) offer strong compression too, but licensing complexity and uncertainty shaped AV1’s “default future” narrative.
- Encoding speed has improved dramatically with encoders like SVT-AV1 and rav1e; early “AV1 is unusably slow” takes aged poorly, but not uniformly.
What AV1 is (and what it isn’t)
AV1 in one sentence
AV1 is a modern video codec designed to reduce bitrate for a given quality, especially at low-to-medium bitrates, with a strong push toward royalty-free adoption.
What engineers should care about
- Bitrate efficiency: you can often deliver similar subjective quality at lower bitrate versus AVC (H.264), sometimes versus HEVC depending on content and settings.
- CPU/GPU trade space: decoding AV1 in software can be expensive; encoding AV1 can be very expensive unless you select sane presets or hardware acceleration.
- Compatibility: “plays everywhere” is still mostly H.264, especially for older hardware and embedded platforms.
- Containers: AV1 commonly ships inside MP4 (ISO BMFF) or Matroska/WebM. You will meet all of them in the wild.
What AV1 is not
- Not a magic bandwidth coupon: savings vary by content. Talking heads compress differently than confetti cannons.
- Not “free” operationally: if you flip an AV1 switch without measuring CPU, you are volunteering for a capacity incident.
- Not a replacement for delivery engineering: ladders, packaging, caching, and player behavior still matter.
Paraphrased idea from Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO): “Everything fails, all the time.” Codecs are not exempt; they just fail in more creative ways.
Where AV1 wins in production
1) Egress and CDN pressure: the quiet budget killer
If you pay for data out, bitrate efficiency becomes a budget line item, not a theoretical metric. Even a modest per-title saving compounds across a catalog,
across a user base, across time. AV1 helps because it can deliver comparable quality at lower bitrates than H.264, particularly where H.264 starts to look like a watercolor.
The operational win isn’t only the bill. Lower bitrate can reduce rebuffering on marginal networks and lessen peak traffic bursts. Your network graphs get less spiky.
Your on-call brain gets more sleep.
2) Storage footprint: fewer bytes, fewer headaches
Storing fewer bytes is not just cheaper; it’s mechanically easier. Smaller objects replicate faster. Backfills complete sooner. Lifecycle transitions
cost less. Restore times improve. If you’re running your own storage, smaller working sets mean better cache behavior and fewer “why is the cluster hot?” mysteries.
3) Better quality at constrained bitrates for “enterprise video”
Corporate video is often watched on bad hotel Wi‑Fi through a VPN while someone shares a screen and the dog decides it’s time to bark.
AV1’s efficiency at lower bitrates can make these conditions less punishing. The business calls it “employee experience.”
SRE calls it “fewer tickets.”
4) AVIF piggybacks the ecosystem
Even if you never ship AV1 video, AVIF may show up in your image optimization pipeline because it can beat JPEG/PNG/WebP for certain content.
That brings AV1 decoding into browsers and devices, and your platform team will suddenly have an opinion about codec support.
5) Long-term standardization pressure
In practice, the ecosystem is converging: modern browsers support AV1, major CDNs understand it, and hardware decode is becoming normal in new devices.
That doesn’t mean “flip it on.” It means the default question is shifting from “why AV1?” to “where not AV1?”
Joke 1: If you think “codec decisions” aren’t your job, wait until the CEO’s keynote video buffers. Congratulations, it’s your job now.
Where AV1 hurts (failure modes you’ll actually see)
Encoding cost: the invoice arrives in CPU time
AV1 encoding can be expensive. Not always, not forever, but enough that you should treat it like any other heavy batch workload:
queue it, cap it, measure it, and assume it will get abused by someone who uploads a 4K 60fps “quick clip.”
The key operational decision is where you spend compute:
- Offline/batch: best for catalogs, VOD, archives, and “process once, serve many.”
- Just-in-time: tempting, but dangerous. You’ll melt your fleet at the worst possible moment.
- Hardware-assisted: great when available, but introduces scheduling and heterogeneity.
Decode cost: battery and old hardware
AV1 decode is widely supported in modern browsers and many newer devices, but “widely” is not “universally,” and software decode can be power-hungry.
The operational symptom is sneaky: not an outage, but increased churn, negative app reviews, or “video makes my phone hot” feedback.
Packaging and compatibility: the sharp edges
Shipping AV1 often involves a ladder: AV1 for capable clients, H.264 (and sometimes HEVC) as fallback. That means more renditions, more manifests,
and more places for a configuration mismatch to create playback failure. The most common bug isn’t the codec itself; it’s the negotiation logic.
Tooling maturity varies by path
FFmpeg is strong. But not every “enterprise media workflow product” handles AV1 as cleanly as it handles H.264.
You’ll find corners where metadata is lost, color spaces are mishandled, or the pipeline assumes “video = AVC.”
Joke 2: Nothing makes you appreciate H.264 like an AV1 encode job that finishes right after the meeting it was meant for.
Three corporate mini-stories from the trenches
Mini-story 1: The incident caused by a wrong assumption
A mid-sized SaaS company added “video replies” inside customer support tickets. The feature was simple: record a clip in the browser, upload it,
transcode it, and play it back inline. The team chose AV1 for storage savings and future-proofing. The assumption was clean and comforting:
“Browsers support AV1 now, so playback will be fine.”
The rollout looked smooth in internal testing. Most employees used modern laptops with updated Chrome. Then it hit the real world:
enterprise customers with locked-down Windows builds, older hardware, and Citrix sessions that were already allergic to video.
Playback didn’t fail gracefully; it fell back to software decode and stuttered like a dial-up modem trying to whistle.
Support escalations spiked. The “video reply” feature got blamed for “slowness” across the app because it pinned CPU in the client.
Meanwhile, the backend graphs looked fine. The SRE on call learned a classic lesson: you can’t debug a client CPU fire with server metrics.
The fix wasn’t heroic. They implemented a real capability check (not user-agent guessing), shipped H.264 fallback, and stopped auto-playing AV1 clips
on constrained clients. The incident postmortem had a single actionable line: never assume decode support based on “latest browser stats”; measure it in your population.
Mini-story 2: The optimization that backfired
An internal media processing platform ran nightly jobs to transcode recorded trainings. Someone noticed the CPU cluster sat idle during the day.
The idea: move transcoding to “just-in-time” when a user hits play, so you only encode what’s watched. Less wasted compute, more “efficient” usage.
It sounded like a win on a slide.
In practice, the first week of the new quarter included onboarding. Thousands of employees hit “play” around the same time.
The JIT pipeline queued AV1 encodes at exactly the moment the system needed low latency. CPU spiked, queues ballooned,
and the player waited on encodes. Users hammered refresh. That created more requests. The classic thundering herd, now with video.
To make it worse, the encoder presets had been tuned for compression, not speed, because “it runs at night anyway.”
AV1 encoding happily consumed all available cores and still asked for more. The autoscaler responded as designed,
but capacity lagged demand. The result wasn’t total outage; it was a slow-motion failure: timeouts, partial playback, angry onboarding feedback.
The rollback was to pre-encode popular content and keep JIT only for rare edge cases, with strict rate limits and faster presets.
The lesson: moving work to the request path is not an optimization; it’s a bet. If you want to make that bet, you price it like one:
load tests, admission control, and queue-based isolation.
Mini-story 3: The boring but correct practice that saved the day
A security team stored surveillance footage and occasionally needed “incident clips” for investigations. They were migrating storage tiers and
wanted better compression. AV1 looked attractive. The engineering manager did the least exciting thing possible: insisted on a small pilot,
a compatibility matrix, and a strict validation step after transcoding (duration, frame count tolerance, audio presence, and a decode test).
During the pilot, a subset of camera feeds produced videos with weird timestamp behavior. The AV1 files were valid, but their container metadata
triggered a player bug in the investigation tool. Without validation, this would have reached production as “random clips won’t play,” the worst kind of bug:
intermittent, unrepeatable, blamed on users.
Because validation was mandatory, the pipeline flagged the bad outputs immediately and quarantined them. The team kept the original H.264 as a fallback
and attached diagnostic artifacts. When the vendor asked for samples, they had them. When auditors asked about evidence integrity, they had a paper trail.
The fix ended up being a container-level change and a player update, not an AV1 abandonment. The boring practice—validate, quarantine, keep a fallback—
turned a potential compliance nightmare into a routine engineering ticket.
Practical tasks: commands, outputs, and decisions
These are the tasks I’d actually run while diagnosing or deploying AV1 in a production pipeline. Each includes a command, realistic output, what it means,
and the decision you make from it.
Task 1: Identify codec and container quickly
cr0x@server:~$ ffprobe -hide_banner -i sample.mp4
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'sample.mp4':
Metadata:
major_brand : isom
Duration: 00:00:20.04, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1850 kb/s
Stream #0:0(und): Video: av1 (av01 / 0x31307661), yuv420p10le, 1920x1080, 29.97 fps, 1720 kb/s
Stream #0:1(und): Audio: opus (Opus / 0x7375704F), 48000 Hz, stereo, 96 kb/s
What it means: This is AV1 video in MP4 with Opus audio. Note 10-bit (yuv420p10le).
Decision: Verify your playback targets can decode AV1 and handle 10-bit. If not, encode an 8-bit fallback (yuv420p) or provide H.264.
Task 2: Check whether decode is hardware-accelerated on Linux
cr0x@server:~$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.20.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.20 (libva 2.12.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver 23.4.1
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
What it means: The GPU supports AV1 decode (VLD) via VA-API.
Decision: On this host, AV1 playback/transcode decode steps can be offloaded. Consider GPU scheduling for decode-heavy services.
Task 3: Confirm NVIDIA decode/encode capabilities (NVDEC/NVENC)
cr0x@server:~$ nvidia-smi --query-gpu=name,driver_version --format=csv
name, driver_version
NVIDIA L4, 550.54.14
What it means: You have an NVIDIA GPU present; model matters for AV1 encode support.
Decision: If you plan AV1 hardware encoding, confirm NVENC supports AV1 on this SKU before committing capacity.
Task 4: Measure whether a client is software decoding (high CPU symptom)
cr0x@server:~$ mpv --hwdec=auto --vo=gpu sample.mp4
(+) Video --vid=1 (*) (av1 1920x1080 29.970fps)
(+) Audio --aid=1 (*) (opus 48000Hz stereo)
AO: [pulse] 48000Hz stereo 2ch float
VO: [gpu] 1920x1080 yuv420p10le
Using hardware decoding (vaapi).
What it means: mpv reports hardware decoding via VA-API. If it said “Using software decoding,” CPU cost would rise sharply.
Decision: If software decoding is used on target machines, ship a fallback or lower complexity (8-bit, lower resolution) AV1 for those clients.
Task 5: Encode AV1 with SVT-AV1 (speed/quality baseline)
cr0x@server:~$ ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -c:v libsvtav1 -preset 8 -crf 34 -g 240 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy output_av1.mkv
...
frame= 600 fps= 52 q=34.0 Lsize= 10.8MiB time=00:00:20.01 bitrate=4422.3kbits/s speed=1.74x
video:10.1MiB audio:0.6MiB subtitle:0.0MiB other streams:0.0MiB global headers:0.0MiB muxing overhead: 1.6%
What it means: Encoding is faster than realtime (1.74x) with a moderate preset. Output is MKV, AV1 video, audio copied.
Decision: If speed is under 1.0x on production content, raise the preset number (faster) or lower complexity goals. If bitrate is too high, adjust CRF or apply film grain tuning carefully.
Task 6: Encode a H.264 fallback with predictable compatibility
cr0x@server:~$ ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart -c:a aac -b:a 128k output_h264.mp4
...
frame= 600 fps=220 q=-1.0 Lsize= 17.2MiB time=00:00:20.01 bitrate=7040.4kbits/s speed=7.33x
What it means: H.264 fallback encodes fast and plays essentially everywhere.
Decision: Keep this as your “floor” rendition for compatibility, especially for enterprise desktops, embedded browsers, and older mobile devices.
Task 7: Compare objective quality (PSNR/SSIM) for a sanity check
cr0x@server:~$ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i output_av1.mkv -lavfi "[0:v][1:v]ssim;[0:v][1:v]psnr" -f null -
...
[Parsed_ssim_0 @ 0x55c1c2c8d700] SSIM Y:0.963421 (14.35) U:0.987210 (18.92) V:0.989003 (19.59) All:0.971085 (15.41)
[Parsed_psnr_1 @ 0x55c1c2c8f100] PSNR y:39.12 u:43.88 v:44.01 average:40.24 min:35.66 max:44.90
What it means: Objective metrics indicate the AV1 encode is close to source. Not perfect, but respectable.
Decision: Use metrics to detect gross regressions across presets, not to declare victory. If SSIM collapses on motion content, adjust preset/CRF or add a higher rung.
Task 8: Detect keyframe interval and GOP structure (streaming stability)
cr0x@server:~$ ffprobe -select_streams v:0 -show_frames -show_entries frame=pict_type,key_frame,best_effort_timestamp_time -of csv=p=0 output_av1.mkv | head
1,I,0.000000
0,P,0.033367
0,P,0.066733
0,P,0.100100
0,P,0.133467
What it means: First frame is a keyframe (I). Subsequent are predicted frames. You can scan for I-frames to confirm spacing.
Decision: If you target HLS/DASH, keep keyframe spacing aligned to segment duration (e.g., 2s or 4s). Misalignment causes inefficient segmenting and poor seeking.
Task 9: Check color space and bit depth to avoid “why is it washed out?”
cr0x@server:~$ ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=pix_fmt,color_space,color_transfer,color_primaries -of default=nw=1 output_av1.mkv
pix_fmt=yuv420p
color_space=bt709
color_transfer=bt709
color_primaries=bt709
What it means: Standard SDR BT.709. If you see bt2020/pq/hlg, you’re in HDR territory.
Decision: Don’t silently convert HDR to SDR without tone mapping; it looks bad and users blame “your player.” If you must, do it explicitly and test.
Task 10: Inspect container brand/compatibility (MP4 playback quirks)
cr0x@server:~$ mp4info output_h264.mp4 | head
Track # 1 Info - Track ID 1 - Time Scale 90000
Media Duration: 20.020 secs
Track Duration: 20.020 secs
Media Info: Language "und" - Type "vide" - Codec "avc1"
Track # 2 Info - Track ID 2 - Time Scale 48000
Media Info: Language "und" - Type "soun" - Codec "mp4a"
What it means: MP4 indicates avc1/mp4a, a safe pairing.
Decision: When shipping AV1 in MP4, validate players in your environment. Some stacks are still more reliable with AV1 in WebM/MKV, depending on client constraints.
Task 11: Benchmark encoder throughput to size your worker pool
cr0x@server:~$ /usr/bin/time -v ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -c:v libsvtav1 -preset 10 -crf 36 -an /tmp/out.mkv
...
Command being timed: "ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -c:v libsvtav1 -preset 10 -crf 36 -an /tmp/out.mkv"
User time (seconds): 82.13
System time (seconds): 3.44
Percent of CPU this job got: 1580%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:05.41
Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 4128440
What it means: AV1 encode used ~16 cores (1580% CPU) and ~4GB RAM peak, finishing in 5.4s for a short clip.
Decision: Cap concurrency based on CPU and memory. If you let the scheduler run “as many as possible,” you’ll create noisy neighbor problems and tail latency elsewhere.
Task 12: Detect when your pipeline is I/O-bound (not codec-bound)
cr0x@server:~$ iostat -xz 1 3
Linux 6.5.0 (server) 01/13/2026 _x86_64_ (32 CPU)
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
78.12 0.00 5.10 9.40 0.00 7.38
Device r/s rkB/s rrqm/s %rrqm r_await rareq-sz w/s wkB/s wrqm/s %wrqm w_await wareq-sz aqu-sz %util
nvme0n1 520.0 68480.0 0.0 0.00 4.10 131.7 310.0 50240.0 0.0 0.00 6.90 162.1 4.20 98.0
What it means: High iowait and ~98% NVMe utilization. Your encoder might be waiting on disk reads/writes.
Decision: Move intermediates to faster local storage, stream through pipes, or reduce concurrent jobs. Don’t “optimize the codec” while your SSD is screaming.
Task 13: Verify that manifests/renditions actually include AV1 where expected
cr0x@server:~$ grep -E "CODECS|av01|avc1" -n master.m3u8 | head
12:#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=900000,RESOLUTION=854x480,CODECS="avc1.4d401f,mp4a.40.2"
18:#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=650000,RESOLUTION=854x480,CODECS="av01.0.05M.08,mp4a.40.2"
What it means: Both H.264 and AV1 variants exist in the master playlist.
Decision: If AV1 lines are missing, your packager or pipeline stage didn’t produce them. Don’t debug players until you confirm packaging is correct.
Task 14: Confirm your worker nodes have the expected AV1 libraries/codec support
cr0x@server:~$ ffmpeg -hide_banner -encoders | grep -E "svtav1|libaom-av1|rav1e"
V....D libaom-av1 libaom AV1 (codec av1)
V....D librav1e librav1e AV1 (codec av1)
V....D libsvtav1 SVT-AV1(Scalable Video Technology for AV1) encoder (codec av1)
What it means: The host can encode AV1 with multiple encoders.
Decision: Standardize on one encoder per tier (e.g., SVT-AV1 for general-purpose) to avoid “works on one worker” drift and inconsistent output quality/bitrate.
Fast diagnosis playbook
When “AV1 is slow” or “AV1 doesn’t play” hits the pager, you don’t have time for codec philosophy. You need a tight sequence that finds the bottleneck fast.
First: Is this encode, decode, or packaging?
- Encode problem: queues rising, worker CPU saturated, job durations growing, users waiting on “processing.”
- Decode problem: client CPU high, battery drain, dropped frames, stutter on specific devices.
- Packaging/manifest problem: immediate playback failure, “unsupported format,” black video, audio-only, or only some clients fail.
Second: Prove the codec and profile in the artifact
- Run
ffprobeon the actual delivered artifact, not the source or the staging file. - Confirm bit depth, color transfer, and container.
Third: Check hardware acceleration availability where it matters
- On servers: VA-API/NVDEC presence, driver health, container permissions.
- On clients: is the device decoding in hardware or software? (Dropped frames correlate with software decode.)
Fourth: Decide whether the bottleneck is CPU, memory, or I/O
- CPU-bound: high user CPU, low iowait, predictable linear slowdown with concurrency.
- Memory-bound: rising RSS, swapping, container OOM kills, long GC pauses in surrounding services.
- I/O-bound: high iowait, saturated disks, slow object storage reads, retries.
Fifth: Reduce scope, then reduce complexity
- Test a single file. One worker. One preset. Known good source.
- Move preset to faster, clamp resolution, force 8-bit SDR, disable nonessential filters.
- If it still fails: suspect environment (drivers, libraries, permissions) rather than “AV1 is broken.”
Common mistakes (symptoms → root cause → fix)
1) Symptom: Playback works on your laptop, stutters for customers
Root cause: Customers are software decoding AV1 (or 10-bit AV1) on constrained hardware/VDI.
Fix: Ship H.264 fallback, avoid auto-play on weak clients, and prefer 8-bit for broad compatibility unless HDR is required.
2) Symptom: Encoding queue grows without bound during peak usage
Root cause: AV1 encoding placed on request path or under-provisioned worker pool; presets optimized for compression not throughput.
Fix: Move to batch, pre-encode popular content, enforce admission control, and choose faster presets for interactive workflows.
3) Symptom: “Unsupported codec” only on certain browsers/devices
Root cause: AV1 support exists but not for that profile/level/bit depth, or container pairing is incompatible.
Fix: Constrain outputs (8-bit Profile 0 for broadest AV1 compatibility), validate container/brand, and implement capability-based selection.
4) Symptom: Colors look washed out or too dark
Root cause: Color metadata lost or misinterpreted; HDR content delivered to SDR pipeline without tone mapping.
Fix: Preserve color tags, explicitly tone-map HDR→SDR, and test on representative displays/players.
5) Symptom: AV1 files are smaller, but “time to first frame” is worse
Root cause: Over-long GOP/keyframe intervals, poor segment alignment, or player struggling with decode complexity at startup.
Fix: Align keyframes to segment boundaries (HLS/DASH), tune startup rungs, and consider slightly higher bitrate for the first segment.
6) Symptom: Workers OOM-kill under load
Root cause: Encoder memory use plus concurrency exceeds limits; large intermediate frames; filters (scale, denoise) amplify memory.
Fix: Set concurrency caps, raise memory limits where justified, reduce filter complexity, and avoid unnecessary intermediate files.
7) Symptom: “It’s slow” but CPU isn’t high
Root cause: I/O-bound pipeline: object storage reads, network throttling, disk saturation, small file overhead.
Fix: Stage inputs locally, batch downloads, use larger multipart settings where applicable, and monitor iowait/%util.
8) Symptom: Manifest shows AV1, but clients always pick H.264
Root cause: Incorrect CODECS strings, missing init segments, or player capability detection rejecting AV1 path.
Fix: Validate manifests, confirm codec strings, test with a known AV1-capable player, and log capability decisions on the client side.
Checklists / step-by-step plan
Step-by-step deployment plan (what I’d do in a real org)
- Define success metrics: egress reduction, storage reduction, playback success rate, encode cost per minute, and p95 processing latency.
- Pick your AV1 scope: VOD catalog only? User uploads? Screen recordings? Real-time calls? Don’t start with “everything.”
- Select an encoder path: SVT-AV1 for general CPU encode, or hardware encode where you can guarantee availability and quality.
- Set conservative output constraints: 8-bit SDR (yuv420p), reasonable GOP (e.g., 2–4s keyframes for streaming), and known-good container.
- Keep a fallback: H.264 baseline/high, AAC audio, MP4 faststart. Non-negotiable until you have measured your client population.
- Build validation gates: ffprobe checks, decode test, duration/frame sanity, audio presence, and quarantine on failure.
- Instrument: encode time, queue depth, CPU per job, memory peak, output size, and playback error rates by codec.
- Roll out by cohort: internal users → small external % → ramp. Watch device classes, not just overall success rate.
- Prepare operational controls: feature flags, per-tenant codec policy, rate limits, and a kill switch that forces H.264.
- Document the “why” and the “how”: so the next team doesn’t “optimize” by removing the fallback.
Encoding policy checklist (boring, repeatable, effective)
- Do we have a defined ladder (renditions, bitrates, resolutions) and keyframe alignment?
- Do we cap AV1 encoding concurrency per host and per cluster?
- Do we validate outputs and quarantine failures automatically?
- Do we log codec selection decisions client-side (capability checks)?
- Do we retain original uploads long enough to reprocess?
- Do we have a documented fallback path and a tested kill switch?
Operational checklist for an on-call handoff
- Dashboards: encode queue depth, job duration p95, worker CPU/memory, I/O wait, error counts by stage (download/encode/package/upload).
- Runbooks: “force H.264,” “disable AV1 rung,” “drain AV1 workers,” “switch presets to fast mode.”
- Sampling: keep a small corpus of “nasty” test videos (high motion, screen capture, HDR) to reproduce issues quickly.
FAQ
1) If I never stream, why should I care about AV1?
Because you still store and deliver video. AV1 changes storage growth, egress, and compute. Those are production concerns, not media-hobby concerns.
2) Is AV1 always smaller than H.264?
Often, but not universally. Gains depend on content type, encoder settings, and quality targets. Measure on your own corpus before rewriting your pipeline around it.
3) Should I replace H.264 with AV1 everywhere?
No. Use AV1 where you have repeat views and bandwidth cost matters, and keep H.264 for maximal compatibility. “Everywhere” is how you end up supporting a museum of devices.
4) What’s the simplest safe rollout strategy?
Add AV1 as an additional rendition, not a replacement. Gate it behind capability detection and keep H.264 as the default fallback until playback data proves otherwise.
5) Which AV1 encoder should I use?
For CPU encoding at scale, SVT-AV1 is a common practical choice due to throughput and quality tradeoffs. libaom can be excellent but may be slower at certain settings.
Pick one, standardize, and benchmark.
6) What about hardware AV1 encoding?
It can be great for throughput and cost per encode-minute, but you must validate output quality, enforce scheduling (GPU is a shared resource), and handle heterogenous nodes.
Hardware acceleration solves one class of problems and introduces another.
7) Is AV1 “royalty-free” and therefore risk-free?
“Royalty-free” is the intent and a major motivation, but business risk isn’t only licensing. Operational risk—compatibility, performance, tooling—is what will wake you up at night.
8) Does AV1 help real-time calls (WebRTC)?
It can, especially at constrained bitrates, but real-time has strict latency and CPU limits. If you deploy AV1 for calls, you need tight hardware assumptions and careful tuning.
9) Why do some AV1 files play but seeking is terrible?
Usually GOP/keyframe spacing, segment alignment, or packaging issues. AV1 isn’t inherently bad at seeking; your encoding and segmentation choices decide that.
10) What’s the one thing teams forget when adopting AV1?
Client-side observability. If you can’t see which codec was selected and whether decode is hardware-accelerated, you’re debugging blind.
Conclusion: what to do next
AV1 matters because it moves pressure around your system. Less bandwidth and storage is real money. More compute and compatibility management is also real money—just billed differently.
The teams that win are the ones that treat codecs like infrastructure: measured, staged, observable, and reversible.
Practical next steps:
- Benchmark your top 20 video types (screen recordings, talking heads, high-motion) with one AV1 preset and one H.264 preset. Record size, encode time, and subjective quality.
- Add AV1 as an opt-in rendition with capability-based selection and keep H.264 fallback.
- Instrument encode and playback paths so you can answer: which codec was served, which was decoded, and was it hardware accelerated?
- Build a kill switch that forces fallback without redeploying. You will use it someday. That day will be inconvenient.