What AV4 Actually Is, Beyond The Spec Sheet
AV4 is the next iteration of the Alliance for Open Media video coding standard family. AV1 handled the initial push toward open, royalty-free high-efficiency encoding. AV2 refined some of the efficiency. AV4 picks up where that left off, targeting roughly 30-40% bitrate savings over AV1 at visually equivalent quality, with better support for high dynamic range, wider color gamuts, and increasingly large frame sizes up to 8K and beyond. It's still in the latter stages of specification finalization and early implementation, so don't expect widespread hardware acceleration yet. Most of what you'll be working with is software encoding for now, which means you're going to need real CPU horsepower or a very patient GPU if you're doing anything at scale. I've been running AV4 encodes through my lab setup for about eight months now, and the gap between the spec and reality is wider than most people realize. The most important thing to understand is that AV4 is not a magic bullet that replaces every existing workflow. It's a tool for specific scenarios, and it breaks in obvious ways if you try to force it into places it wasn't designed for. The core innovation in AV4 centers around improved block partitioning structures, better motion estimation with sub-pixel accuracy improvements, and enhanced loop filtering that reduces the banding and blocking artifacts that used to plague AOM codecs at lower bitrates. There's also improved screen content coding, which matters if you're encoding anything with sharp edges, text, or UI elements. For natural footage, the gains are real but incremental. For mixed content, the improvements are more noticeable.
The Encoding Pipeline
Getting AV4 content encoded right now requires a different approach than just dropping a file into your usual encoding pipeline. Here's what the process actually looks like in practice. First, you need a compatible encoder. As of mid-2026, the reference implementation from AOMedia has been integrated into libvpx-based toolchains and there are early encoder builds from several major players. You'll typically be working with command-line tools rather than a GUI. If you're on Linux, the process looks something like this: You install the AV4-enabled build of your encoder, point it at your source material, and configure the preset and CRQ (constant rate quality) settings. The default settings are conservative, which means your first encode will be slower than you expect. I usually start with a preset around 4 or 5 for production work, then drop it to 6 or 7 when I need faster turnaround and can tolerate slightly lower quality at the same bitrate. The difference between preset 4 and preset 7 is substantial—roughly three to four times the encode time for maybe a 5-10% quality improvement at equivalent bitrates. Know which side of that tradeoff you need before you start.
Source material preparation matters more than you might think. AV4 handles high bit-depth content better than AV1, but feeding it a poorly prepared source will expose weaknesses in the prediction structures. Make sure your input is properly color-graded and that any upscaling has already been done before encoding. Running an AV4 encoder on a 4K source that was upscaled from 1080p inside the encoder itself produces visibly softer results than encoding a native 4K source. I learned this the hard way on a client project last year.
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Playback And Distribution Reality
Here's where things get tricky. AV4 playback support is fragmented. Some modern mobile chips have begun incorporating AV4 decode acceleration, but desktop and laptop support is still largely software-based. Browser support exists in experimental channels but isn't ready for production deployment yet. If you're building a distribution pipeline, you need to plan for a fallback strategy. The approach I use is to encode in AV4 for archival and CDN storage, then transcode to AV1 or H.265 at the edge or on-demand for delivery. This means your origin storage benefits from AV4's efficiency, but your viewers get content through a format their device actually supports. It's not ideal, but it's the only way to make AV4 work today without alienating anyone. Cloud transcoding services like those from AWS Elemental, Google Transcoder API, or specialized providers handle the AV1/H.265 fallback, and the cost is manageable if you're only transcoding on demand rather than keeping permanent dual-format libraries. I ran into a specific issue last fall while setting up a multi-CDN distribution workflow. The CDN provider's edge nodes had AV4 decode buffers configured too low for certain resolution and bitrate combinations. Anything above 4K at 60fps with high dynamic range would cause buffer underruns and visible stalling on certain player implementations. The workaround was to cap the AV4 streams at 4K 30fps for the initial rollout and only enable higher resolutions once the CDN providers updated their edge node configurations. This cost us about two weeks of delay and some awkward marketing, but it prevented a much worse situation where viewers would have experienced constant playback failures.
Storage And Bandwidth Implications
The primary reason anyone is interested in AV4 is compression efficiency. At equivalent perceptual quality, AV4 files are typically 30-40% smaller than AV1 and 15-25% smaller than H.265/HEVC. Over a library of content, this adds up quickly. A streaming service storing tens of thousands of hours of 4K content will see significant infrastructure cost reduction, and even smaller operations benefit from reduced egress costs. But there's a catch that people don't always mention. AV4 encode times are longer than AV1 for equivalent quality settings, and significantly longer than H.264 or H.265. If your ingest pipeline is already tight, switching to AV4 can double or triple your encoding time depending on the complexity of your source material. A two-hour 4K film that takes about 45 minutes to encode in AV1 might take 90 to 120 minutes in AV4 at similar quality presets. Factor in your queue management, your retention policies, and your release schedules before you make the switch. For long-term archival, the math is favorable. Storage costs are dropping, but not fast enough to ignore, and AV4's efficiency means you can store more content in the same space while maintaining better quality than AV1. I'd recommend transitioning your archival pipeline to AV4 first, then moving your active distribution to a hybrid approach as playback support improves.
Common Pitfalls
The biggest mistake I see is assuming AV4 is a drop-in replacement. It isn't. Your existing encoding presets will produce different results, your quality control checks need to account for the different artifact profiles, and your CDN configurations may need adjustment. Plan for a transition period of at least three to six months even if you're a small operation. Another issue is bitrate allocation. AV4's improved coding efficiency means you can drop your target bitrate and still maintain quality, but if you're not monitoring actual quality metrics, you might undershoot and end up with content that looks worse than your previous AV1 or H.265 versions. Use VMAF or similar perceptual quality metrics during your test encodes, not just PSNR. PSNR will mislead you with AV4 because the codec's artifact patterns don't correlate well with that metric. There's also the issue of variable bitrate streaming. AV4 handles CBR and VBR differently than previous formats, and some streaming adapters struggle with the bitrate curves that AV4 naturally produces. If you're using HLS or DASH, test your segmenter carefully. I've seen cases where the segmenter would create unusually long segments at the beginning of scenes with high motion complexity, causing buffer bloat and delayed startup times for viewers. Switching to a fixed GOP structure with explicit segment boundaries resolved the issue.
What To Do If You Can't Wait
If you need better compression efficiency now and can't transition to AV4, AV1 is still a strong choice. It's widely supported, hardware decode is available on most modern devices, and the quality per bitrate is close enough to AV4 that the gap won't matter for most use cases in the near term. H.265 remains relevant for scenarios where encode speed is more important than storage efficiency. The timeline for AV4 becoming the default is roughly two to four years for full production readiness. Hardware decode support will spread first, followed by browser support, then CDN and platform integration. If you're planning a long-term content strategy, start experimenting with AV4 now so your team understands the workflow before you need to deploy it under pressure. I keep a reference copy of the AOMedia AV4 specification documents and the encoder source code on a dedicated workstation in the lab. The spec is dense, but reading through the coding tools section gives you a much better sense of what's actually changing than any marketing material. Combined with hands-on encode tests using standardized test sequences, you'll develop an intuition for when AV4 makes sense and when it doesn't. That distinction is what separates teams that adopt the format smoothly from teams that struggle with it for years.
