The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has officially released the AV2 v1.0 specification, the next-generation open video codec succeeding AV1. The milestone was confirmed via the AOM Video Model (AVM) reference software on GitHub, with its changelog dated May 29, 2026 and tagged as “the first released version of AV2” — arriving roughly half a year after AOMedia’s earlier end-of-2025 target. The release coincides with Computex 2026. AOMedia describes AV2 as engineered to “provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates,” with added improvements for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery, and screen content handling. Early benchmarks indicate roughly 30% better compression efficiency over AV1 at equivalent quality. The specification is publicly available at av2.aomedia.org.
The v1.0.0 AVM reference software is a starting point rather than a production-ready encoder: early testers report it performs best only at very low bitrates, with detail retention and encoding speed still requiring substantial optimization. VideoLAN has separately published Dav2d, an open-source CPU-based AV2 decoder in the spirit of its Dav1d AV1 counterpart. Hardware GPU acceleration remains likely years away — AV1 itself took several years to achieve mainstream encode/decode support across Nvidia, AMD, and Intel products, and many platforms still rely on H.264 and H.265 for broad compatibility.