YouTube publishes the first videos encoded in AV1: The first beta playlist is available

YouTube has uploaded the first videos processed with the codec AV1, which was introduced in recent months. The company has created a ” beta ” playlist in order to allow developers of browsers, decoders and encoders to understand how to best exploit the new ” royalty-free ” technology.

Together with YouTube, Netflix also showed interest in the AV1 codec, and already offers a video in different resolutions with support for different depths of color.

There are 14 AV1 videos published now on YouTube, and all present in a first launch playlist. Here we find content of various kinds, such as music clips, talk shows, action videos, and demos of RED and Blackmagic Design.

The contents present tend to offer a glimpse of the most widely viewed types of video, so as to allow the company to deduce the performance of videos made with AV1 codecs in terms of speed, power consumption and stability over multiple types of devices.

To play videos made with the new codec, you need to use Chrome 70 (not yet available in the Stable channel) or the Nightly builds of Firefox released starting September 12. Moreover, the test videos use AV1 only at resolutions lower than 480p, as to underline the fact that they are suitable for the decoder test which, to date, have no optimization. Furthermore, the AV1 decoding is not yet supported by any component hardware, and the processing must be performed entirely by the CPU.

In the future, it can be used for content at a resolution even greater than 4K, with full support for HDR technologies and wider color gamut. It is different from the approach of Netflix, which offers only one video at different resolutions: we start from 432p up to 1080p with a color depth of 8 and 10-bit for each resolution available. According to YouTube, the collection of videos processed in AV1 will be progressively expanded over time.