AV1 vs HEVC [2026]: 30.6% Fewer Bits, 1 Vendor Test

AV1 beats HEVC on bits per picture, and HEVC beats AV1 on how many devices play the file without a fuss. That split still drives the choice on November 10, 2026. In Bitmovin’s own October 2026 test, its AV1 encoder needed 30.6% fewer bits than its previous HEVC encoder at the same quality, at roughly the same encoding speed.

The hardware excuse is gone. Intel lists AV1 and HEVC encode and decode on current chips such as the Core Ultra X7 368H, and NVIDIA’s ninth-generation NVENC encodes both. What remains is a reach question: which screens will decode your file, and what will it cost you in licences, render time and fallback copies.

This comparison puts the two codecs side by side with dated numbers from vendor pages, the Alliance for Open Media, NVIDIA, Intel, Apple and the BBC. It sits inside our export and codecs guides, so it skips the container debate and sticks to the codec itself. Every figure carries a source and a check date of November 10, 2026.

AV1 vs HEVC in 2026: the short answer

Pick AV1 when you control the delivery path and bitrate is the bill. Pick HEVC when you need the file to play on whatever the viewer owns, or when you edit and record on cameras and software built around it. Keep H.264 as the last-resort fallback for old devices, since NVIDIA’s own documentation still calls it the compatibility-first choice.

Here is the shortest version of the evidence:

• Efficiency: AV1 generally delivers lower bitrate at comparable quality. Bitmovin measured 23.4% fewer bits on a fixed ladder and 30.6% with Per-Title encoding against its previous HEVC encoder (14 clips, October 19, 2026).
• Speed: AV1 is heavier to encode in general, while HEVC is usually easier and faster to encode in hardware. Bitmovin reports a rare tie in its cloud test: about 0.38x real time for AV1 against 0.37x for HEVC.
• Reach: AV1 hardware decode is newer and less universal. HEVC is mature and broadly deployed. Bitmovin’s own advice for V3 is AV1 for screens that decode it, HEVC with Dolby Vision or multi-HDR for the rest, and H.264 for the long tail.
• Cost: AOMedia describes AV1 as royalty-free. HEVC sits under patent licensing, with HEVC Advance publishing per-device rates according to a secondary report.
• Next step: AV2 was released about four months before AOMedia’s October 22, 2026 announcement, and claims roughly 30% more compression efficiency than AV1. No generally available AV2 hardware encoder was confirmed as of today.

The rest of this article shows where each claim comes from, where it stops being true, and how to move a project from HEVC to AV1 without stranding anyone.

AV1 vs HEVC specs compared

The table below lists the facts that matter when you pick an export codec. It uses only lines confirmed on vendor or standards-body pages checked on November 10, 2026. Where a vendor has not published a figure, the cell says so rather than guessing.

Two rows deserve a second look. The licence row decides who pays, and the hardware decode row decides who can watch. Everything else (bitrate, speed, HDR) is a trade you can tune inside a project, while those two shape the delivery plan before you open the editor.

Note what the table cannot tell you. No official 2026 matrix compares Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Apple and Qualcomm support side by side, so a supports-AV1 line on a spec sheet still needs a check against the exact chip, driver and application you plan to use.

What changed in the last three months

The biggest shift is that AV1 is no longer the newest codec from its own family. AOMedia announced on October 22, 2026 that AV2 had been released four months earlier, and it reported ecosystem momentum across software decoding, testing, interoperability and hardware readiness. AOMedia was also showcasing AV2 ecosystem developments at IBC 2026.

AV2 does not change your export choice this year. AOMedia claims about 30% more compression efficiency than AV1, but the announcement did not confirm a generally available AV2 hardware encoder, consumer GPU support or a production-ready encoding product. AOMedia itself still describes AV1 as the established adoption path.

Several other dated changes matter more for a creator’s next export:

• July 31, 2026: NVIDIA released Video Codec SDK 13.1, with AV1 hierarchical reference mode that allows up to 31 B-frames, up from a prior maximum of seven.
• September 26, 2026: AOMedia reportedly announced libaom v3.15, the reference AV1 encoder library.
• October 19, 2026: Bitmovin published the efficiency figures for Encoder V3, its new HEVC and AV1 encoders, and cut its managed-cloud AV1 price multipliers by 50%.
• October 2026: Apple announced a new Apple TV 4K, which Apple’s newsroom post says uses an A19 chip with a dedicated AV1 decoder.
• November 1, 2026: SVT-AV1 4.3.0 reportedly shipped, according to a single research pass, so check the project’s release page before you rely on it.
• November 4, 2026: Bitmovin added AV1 support for Dolby Vision Profiles 10.0 and 10.1, available in its current VOD Encoder release.

On the HEVC side, the news is quieter. No rename, retirement or acquisition of the codec or its main implementations was confirmed in the period. Licensing is the live story: Access Advance reportedly raised rates and caps by 25% for new licensees from January 1, 2026, and companies that signed by June 30, 2026 reportedly kept earlier rates through 2030. Treat those figures as reported, not as a rate card.

Camera makers keep investing in H.265 too. HEVC has extensive hardware decoding and encoding support in modern phones, cameras, GPUs, televisions and operating systems. If your footage comes from a camera like that, HEVC stays in your pipeline whether you like it or not.

Quality and bitrate: benchmarks from four sources

Codec benchmarks only mean something when you read the test setup next to the number. The table collects every AV1 vs HEVC figure on the current facts sheet, with the vendor and date attached. Two of the rows come from a single vendor, so read them as that vendor’s results on its own encoder, not as a law of nature.

What the 2026 numbers say

Start with the Bitmovin result because it is the freshest. Across 14 clips, AV1 needed fewer bits than the previous HEVC encoder on every clip. On the fixed ladder, the saving ranged from 16% on the easiest clip to 29% on the hardest. Sports led the categories, at 26% on a fixed ladder and 35% with Per-Title.

That pattern matters for creators. Fast gameplay, sports and screen action are the content where bitrate hurts most, and AV1’s advantage grows there. On a 60 fps sports clip at the same 720p rung, Bitmovin scored AV1 at VMAF 88.0 against 83.5 for HEVC, with bitrates within 7 kbps of each other.

The honest limit: Bitmovin’s new HEVC encoder is itself 15.5% leaner than the old one. Because the 30.6% figure compares AV1 with the previous HEVC encoder, the gap against Bitmovin’s new HEVC encoder must be smaller than 30.6%. A Bitmovin comparison updated November 10, 2026 reportedly says the newer HEVC generation narrowed the gap. These are vendor results on cloud encoders, not on the HEVC encoder in your GPU.

What the BBC measured in 2019

For an outside baseline, the BBC’s engineering arm tested these codecs before either had mass hardware support. The numbers are old and the software was early, so use them for direction only. In its 2019 write-up, BBC Research and Development reported a close race: “AV1 on the other hand performed very similarly to HEVC, with average 2.5% loss over the HD sequences, and 1.3% gains for the UHD sequences.”

The same BBC post described where the curves cross: “What is interesting here is that AV1 produces higher quality video at lower bit rates, but is passed at higher bit rates.” That fits what creators see today. AV1 shines when you starve the bitrate, and the gap closes when you feed the file generously.

The BBC also flagged the cost side in 2019: “Our previous testing showed that AV1 performed similar to HEVC although at significantly higher encoding and decoding times.” That cost has shrunk since, with dedicated encoders in current GPUs and Bitmovin’s equal-speed result, though AV1 still runs heavier than HEVC in general.

Encoding speed and CPU cost

Speed is where AV1 used to lose outright, and the 2019 BBC numbers show how bad it was. Describing AV1 against HM, the HEVC reference software, the BBC wrote: “AV1 on the other hand takes about 4x as long to encode, but is 8% quicker than HM to decode.” Reference software was never built for speed, so that ratio overstates the gap against a tuned encoder, yet the direction held for years.

In 2026 the picture splits by encoder type. Software AV1 encoders remain computationally heavier than HEVC in general, and AOMedia’s own materials say so. Hardware encoders change the math because the work moves to fixed-function silicon. NVIDIA’s documentation lists H.264, HEVC and AV1 as NVENC output codecs, and the PyNvVideoCodec guide covers transcode pipelines that run decode and encode on the GPU.

Cloud encoders show the newest speed data. Bitmovin reported that its V3 AV1 encoder cut encoding time by 66% at equal quality and delivered three times the throughput of its previous AV1 encoder. It also reported that the new HEVC encoder used about 25% less cloud compute time. Both claims come from Bitmovin’s launch testing, and the company itself tells readers to measure on their own presets.

For a creator, the practical rule is simple. If you render on a laptop CPU, expect AV1 to take longer than HEVC. If you render on a recent NVIDIA or Intel GPU, the gap narrows because the encoder is dedicated hardware. If you upload to a platform that re-encodes your file anyway, the master you send matters more than the codec’s speed on your desk.

Live streaming is the harder case, and the sheet has less data for it. Bitmovin’s V3 added Media over QUIC as a live-transport option aimed at sub-second latency, and real-time VMAF scoring for H.264, HEVC and AV1 is planned for a later V3 release, not in the first builds. For a streamer going live from a home PC, that means the hardware encoder’s quality mode and your upload bandwidth set the result, and no cloud benchmark on this page predicts it.

One more data point on memory: NVIDIA’s SDK 13.1 notes that the 31-B-frame AV1 mode raises video memory use. Cards with tight VRAM that also run a game, a capture app and a browser may hit that ceiling sooner than the benchmark charts suggest. Test the mode with your full streaming setup running, not on an idle desktop.

Hardware encoding: NVENC, Quick Sync and the GPU you own

Check your hardware before you pick a codec. NVIDIA’s GeForce page identifies the ninth-generation NVENC in the RTX 50 Series and RTX Spark, with improved AV1 and HEVC quality, three NVENC engines and new 4:2:2 H.264 and HEVC encoding support. The GeForce RTX 5090 is the current desktop flagship on NVIDIA’s graphics-card page, checked today.

NVIDIA’s own summary of the direction is plain. AV1 is the preferred modern codec for bitrate efficiency and streaming, while HEVC stays more broadly compatible with existing devices and workflows. The 4:2:2 note also matters for editors, because 4:2:2 is listed for H.264 and HEVC, not for AV1, in that ninth-generation description. If you capture 4:2:2 footage, that detail pushes you toward HEVC.

Older cards need care. A November 2026 research pass reports AV1 encoding on RTX 40 and 50 cards but not on RTX 30, so an RTX 30 owner should plan on HEVC or H.264 for hardware encodes. A November 9, 2026 NVIDIA documentation page also reportedly states that data-center GPUs such as the A100, H100, H200, B200 and GB200 have NVDEC but no NVENC. If you rent a cloud GPU for encoding, check that it includes an encoder at all.

Intel’s side is simpler. Quick Sync Video is integrated into supported Intel hardware with no separately listed codec subscription. The Core Ultra 9 386H and Core Ultra X7 368H pages list AV1 and HEVC encode and decode, and VVC (H.266) as decode-only. Intel also notes that Arc graphics availability is limited to qualifying systems and needs OEM enablement, so a family name does not guarantee identical behaviour in every laptop.

AMD hardware also reportedly encodes AV1 on recent parts, but the exact models and driver requirements need a check against AMD’s own matrix. The same advice applies across vendors: confirm the encoder generation, the driver version and the exact application before you build a delivery plan on a spec-sheet checkbox.

Playback and compatibility: where AV1 still breaks

AV1 decoding keeps spreading, but it has not reached every screen. In October 2026 Apple announced a new Apple TV 4K that, according to Apple’s newsroom post, uses an A19 chip with a dedicated AV1 decoder. That is good news for new buyers and a reminder that older boxes lack the same silicon.

Browsers lean toward AV1. Bitmovin’s pages describe web-platform compatibility as generally more favourable for AV1, and AOMedia says AV1 powers services and devices across streaming, browsers, mobile devices, operating systems, communications platforms and consumer electronics. That makes AV1 a fine pick for video embedded in a website you control.

HEVC’s weak spot is different. It needs more capable decoding hardware than H.264, and on Windows it has historically depended on an add-on. The Microsoft Store lists an HEVC and MOV Player that plays HEVC, MOV, MKV and MP4 without a separate HEVC codec extension, according to its listing from early November 2026. Check the Store for the current price of Microsoft’s own HEVC Video Extensions before you rely on it.

For client work, this is the practical test. Ask what the client opens the file on. A marketing team on recent laptops and phones will probably play either codec. A hotel lobby TV, a trade-show kiosk or a customer’s five-year-old smart TV will play H.264 and might play HEVC, but AV1 is a gamble there.

Bitmovin’s Dolby Vision announcement states the strategy outright: keep H.264 or HEVC renditions for devices that do not support AV1. That is multi-codec delivery, and it means AV1 saves bandwidth on the screens that support it without removing the need for a fallback. For a solo creator uploading to a video platform, the platform builds those ladders for you.

Licensing and pricing

Codec licence cost rarely hits an individual creator directly. Your editor, camera or GPU maker has usually settled it. It does hit companies that ship encoders, run streaming services or sell devices, and it shapes which codec vendors push. The table lists every cost line the facts sheet confirms, with the date of the page it came from.

The Bitmovin row carries the biggest 2026 change. Cutting AV1 cost multipliers by 50% for managed cloud customers puts AV1 on the same price level as HEVC there, which Bitmovin says shifts the choice toward bitrate and picture quality. That is one vendor’s price list, not a market rate.

On the HEVC side, x265 reportedly remains an open-source encoder under GPL-2.0 with a separate commercial licence option. The codec itself stays patent-licensed rather than royalty-free, and the research pass found no current official price list. Check what your editor’s plan covers before you assume an export preset is free of licence terms.

No official AV1 price catalog exists, because AV1 itself carries no licence fee. Hardware, software, cloud encoding and streaming-service prices are set by vendors, so the cost question becomes a vendor question every time.

Six real-world examples

1. YouTube’s catalog. AOMedia reports that YouTube had more than 90% of its catalog, weighted by watch time, available in AV1 as of March 19, 2026. If your audience watches on YouTube, most of them already receive AV1 streams even when you upload something else.

2. Netflix. AOMedia reportedly cited Netflix as saying AV1 powered more than one-third of its global video-on-demand streaming as of September 9, 2026. The figure comes from a single research pass, so treat it as a reported number. It still shows AV1 has moved from experiment to workhorse for a major catalog.

3. Fast sports content. Bitmovin’s 60 fps sports clip is the hardest test in its set. At the same 720p rung and bitrates within 7 kbps, AV1 scored VMAF 88.0 against 83.5 for HEVC. Gameplay and sports streams behave like that clip, so they gain the most from AV1.

4. Dolby Vision ladders. Bitmovin’s V3 can build AV1 Dolby Vision, AV1 SDR and AVC or HEVC fallback renditions from the same Dolby Vision source. One master feeds three tiers. It shows how real services mix codecs instead of picking one winner.

5. Camera footage. Camera workflows keep HEVC alive at the capture end, which means many projects start as HEVC and only turn into AV1 at the delivery end.

6. Living-room playback. Apple’s new Apple TV 4K, announced in October 2026, includes a dedicated AV1 decoder in its A19 chip per Apple’s newsroom. A streamer or YouTuber who ships AV1 files for TV viewers can count that device among the newcomers, while older streaming boxes still fall back to HEVC or H.264.

One more example comes from the encoder-box market. Matrox listed the Maevex 7112H on November 9, 2026, a single-channel 4K60 encoder for H.264 and H.265 with zero-latency pass-through. That is a reported product page, but it signals that dedicated live-encoding gear still targets HEVC first.

Render settings: what to export for each job

The table below turns the evidence into export choices. It avoids bitrate numbers because the vendor pages do not publish universal values, and a bitrate that works for a talking-head vlog fails on fast game footage. Match resolution and frame rate to the source, then let the encoder’s quality mode set the bitrate.

Short stings deserve a note because they sit at the start of every upload. A five-second intro saves almost nothing in bandwidth from AV1, and it has to play on every device a viewer owns. If you build intros from templates, the intro themes page lists resolution, length and frame rate for each theme, which gives you the three numbers your export has to match.

From the Vipid archive: the animated logo intro theme shows the kind of short, flat-colour clip where codec choice matters far less than clean edges and a safe format.

Use-case recommendations

YouTuber uploading long videos. Export a high-quality master in whichever codec your editor handles best, and let the platform do the rest. With YouTube holding more than 90% of its catalog in AV1 by watch time, your viewers likely get AV1 either way. Spend your effort on the edit, not the codec.

Streamer recording gameplay locally. If you own an RTX 40 or 50 card or a recent Intel chip, try AV1 hardware encoding for fast-action recordings, since sports-style content showed the largest gains. Keep HEVC as the choice when you need 4:2:2 or when your editor handles it more smoothly.

Small studio delivering to clients. Ship H.264 as the default and add HEVC for clients with modern machines. Offer AV1 only when the client confirms their playback chain. A fallback file costs minutes, and a file that will not play costs the relationship.

Website owner embedding video. Use AV1 with an H.264 fallback. Bitmovin’s pages describe web compatibility as generally more favourable for AV1, and the bandwidth savings show up in every page view. Test on the oldest phone you can borrow before you ship.

Videographer shooting log footage. Stay with the camera’s H.265 for capture and editing. Nikon’s reported RED Log in H.265 shows camera makers still build creative features on HEVC. Convert to AV1 only at the delivery stage, and keep the original files.

Anyone building a cloud encoding pipeline. AV1 now costs the same as HEVC in Bitmovin’s managed cloud, according to Bitmovin’s October 19, 2026 pricing change, so bitrate and picture quality can decide. Check your GPU instances first, because some data-center GPUs have decoders but no encoders.

Migration guide: moving a HEVC workflow to AV1

Move in small steps and keep the old files. The order below puts the risky decisions first, because the question that sinks a migration is almost never the encoder. It is the device nobody asked about.

1. List your playback devices. Write down the TVs, phones, browsers and kiosks your audience uses. Mark any that predate dedicated AV1 decoding.
2. Check your encoder hardware. Confirm the GPU or chip lists AV1 encoding in the vendor’s own specification. An RTX 30 card reportedly does not, while RTX 40 and 50 cards do.
3. Pick one test clip. Choose the hardest footage you make, such as fast gameplay or crowd scenes, because that is where AV1 pulls ahead.
4. Encode the clip twice. Make one HEVC file and one AV1 file with the same target quality and compare size. Use your encoder’s quality mode, not a hand-picked bitrate.
5. Watch both on your worst device. Play each file on the oldest screen in your list. If AV1 fails to play, you found your fallback requirement.
6. Keep a HEVC or H.264 rendition. Follow the multi-codec pattern Bitmovin recommends: AV1 for screens that decode it, HEVC for the rest, H.264 for the long tail.
7. Move delivery first, then capture. Switch exports and web embeds to AV1 before you touch camera or recording settings, since cameras and editors still lean on HEVC.
8. Re-check in six months. AV2 and new hardware generations are arriving, so revisit the plan when AV2 encoders ship.

Sample FFmpeg commands

These commands use the SVT-AV1 and x265 encoders in FFmpeg with placeholders for quality values. Pick the quality and preset values from your encoder’s own documentation, because the right setting depends on your footage. HandBrake is another open-source tool you can use for the same comparison.

ffmpeg -i source.mov -c:v libsvtav1 -crf VALUE -preset VALUE -c:a copy test-av1.mp4
ffmpeg -i source.mov -c:v libx265 -crf VALUE -preset VALUE -tag:v hvc1 -c:a copy test-hevc.mp4
ls -l test-av1.mp4 test-hevc.mp4

Compare the two file sizes, then watch both on your worst device. The hvc1 tag helps Apple players recognise HEVC inside an MP4. If your editor already exports both codecs through a preset, use the preset, and save the command line for batch jobs and servers.

Pros and cons of each codec

The table hides one tension. AV1’s biggest cons (decode reach, encode cost) shrink every year as hardware ships, while HEVC’s biggest cons (licensing, efficiency gap) stay where they are. That trend favours AV1 over a multi-year view, even though HEVC remains the safer pick for the next project you export this week.

Weigh the cons against your own audience, not an average one. A gaming channel with a young, device-current audience hits AV1’s decode limits less often than a corporate training library watched on locked-down office machines.

Verdict: which codec should you pick?

AV1 wins on efficiency, HEVC wins on reach, and neither wins on everything. The numbers behind that call: Bitmovin measured 23.4% to 30.6% fewer bits for AV1 against its previous HEVC encoder across 14 clips, with an equal-speed result of about 0.38x against 0.37x real time. AOMedia reports YouTube above 90% AV1 by watch time. Against that, AV1 hardware decode remains newer and less universal, and NVIDIA still calls H.264 the compatibility-first codec.

Our call by situation:

• Choose AV1 for web video you host, long-lived streaming catalogs, bandwidth-heavy fast-action content and cloud pipelines where AV1 now prices like HEVC.
• Choose HEVC for camera capture, editing interchange, 4:2:2 work, and delivery to devices you cannot check.
• Choose both when you serve an audience you do not control: AV1 first, HEVC second, H.264 last.
• Wait on AV2 until a real hardware encoder and decoder ship. AOMedia has not confirmed one as of today.

If you only remember one number, remember the caveat attached to it. The 30.6% figure belongs to one vendor’s cloud encoder against its own older HEVC encoder, and Bitmovin warns that results vary by content, ladder strategy and settings. Run the two-file test from the migration guide on your own footage before you change a delivery default.

Common questions

Is AV1 better than HEVC?

On bitrate, generally yes. AV1 usually reaches the same quality with fewer bits, and Bitmovin measured 23.4% to 30.6% fewer bits against its previous HEVC encoder. On device reach and hardware encoding ease, HEVC still leads, so the better codec depends on where the file plays.

Does AV1 need a new GPU?

For hardware AV1 encoding, probably. A November 2026 research pass reports AV1 encoding on NVIDIA RTX 40 and 50 cards but not RTX 30. Intel lists AV1 encode on current Core Ultra pages. Software AV1 encoding works on any CPU but runs slower.

Is HEVC free to use?

The codec is patent-licensed, not royalty-free, and device and software makers typically handle that licensing for you. AV1 is described by AOMedia as royalty-free. Check your editor’s and platform’s terms for the specifics.

Will AV2 replace AV1 soon?

Not this year for creators. AOMedia says AV2 was released about four months before October 22, 2026 and claims roughly 30% more compression efficiency than AV1. It did not confirm a generally available AV2 hardware encoder, so AV1 remains the practical choice today.

Which codec should I upload to a video platform?

Send the highest-quality master your editor exports cleanly. Platforms re-encode uploads, and YouTube already holds more than 90% of its catalog in AV1 by watch time per AOMedia. Your master’s quality matters more than whether it is HEVC or AV1.

Do older TVs and phones play AV1?

Often not in hardware. AV1 decode support is newer and less universal than HEVC, and Bitmovin recommends HEVC or H.264 renditions for devices that lack AV1. Newer devices, such as Apple’s October 2026 Apple TV 4K, include a dedicated AV1 decoder.

Can Windows play HEVC files?

Yes, with the right player or extension. Microsoft Store lists a free HEVC and MOV Player that plays HEVC, MOV, MKV and MP4 without a separate codec extension. Verify the current listing in the Store before you recommend it to a client.

More from the Vipid blog

• AV1 vs H.264 [2026]: Smaller Files, 3 Conditions
• WebM vs MP4 [2026]: 3 Codecs, 1 Safe Default
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