What Are VP9 and AV1?

Streaming sites buffer less on slow Wi-Fi than they did five years ago. Part of that is VP9 and AV1, codecs tuned for internet delivery rather than Blu-ray discs.

Why new codecs keep appearing

Each codec generation tries to pack the same visible quality into fewer bits. Fewer bits means lower CDN bills and smoother playback on phones.

H.264 and H.265 come from the ITU/MPEG world. VP9 (Google) and AV1 (Alliance for Open Media) aim for open, royalty-free use on the web. Patents and licensing shaped which sites adopted which format.

For your desk, the question is simpler: can you encode fast, play everywhere, and hit the size cap? Often that means H.264 or HEVC in MP4, not AV1, unless you control the whole pipeline. Creator uploads still benefit from optimize video for YouTube on Mac even when the platform transcodes again.

Royalty-free codecs matter to billion-stream platforms, not to a designer emailing a 20 MB clip. Your bottleneck is usually compatibility and encode time, not patent pools.

VP9 basics

VP9 launched as a successor to VP8. YouTube served billions of VP9 streams before AV1 rollout accelerated.

Traits:

• Better compression than H.264 at similar bitrates.
• Common inside WebM containers on the web.
• Hardware decode on many Android phones and recent desktops, but uneven in older corporate laptops.

Creators rarely export VP9 from Final Cut or Premiere as a default delivery format. You consume VP9 more than you author it.

Adaptive streaming means the service picks VP9 or AV1 for you on the viewer side. Uploading H.264 does not prevent viewers from receiving a modern codec later.

AV1 basics

AV1 is the newer open codec from AOMedia members (browser and chip vendors). It targets another 30 percent or more savings over VP9 or HEVC at comparable quality, especially at low bitrates.

Traits:

• Excellent for streaming platforms that transcode once and serve millions.
• Encoding is slow on CPU without dedicated hardware.
• Decode support grew quickly on TVs, GPUs, and mobile chips from 2020 onward.

AV1 inside MP4 and WebM exists, but camera and screen recorder defaults still overwhelmingly ship H.264 or HEVC.

How they compare to H.264 and H.265

Codec	Compression efficiency	Encode speed	Playback reach
H.264	Baseline	Fast	Universal
H.265 (HEVC)	High	Medium with HW	Very good on modern devices
VP9	High	Slow on CPU	Good in browsers, mixed offline
AV1	Very high	Slowest without HW	Growing, not universal

At 1080p, AV1 can look cleaner than H.264 at half the bitrate on hard content. At high bitrates for archiving, differences shrink.

See H.264 vs H.265 for the codecs you control in most export dialogs today.

At very low bitrates (under 1 Mbps at 720p), AV1 and VP9 shine on hard content. At delivery bitrates you would actually attach to email, H.264 tuned well is often good enough.

Where you already encounter VP9 and AV1

• Adaptive streaming on major video platforms (automatic quality ladders).
• WebM assets on sites optimizing for Chrome and Firefox.
• Some conferencing tools simulcast modern codecs to save bandwidth.

You do not pick AV1 when attaching an MP4 to email. The recipient player expects H.264 or HEVC.

Encoding time and hardware support

Software AV1 encodes can be 5 to 10 times slower than H.264 on the same machine for similar visual targets. Hardware encoders on recent GPUs and Apple Silicon improve that gap but require supported apps and drivers.

VP9 sits between H.265 and AV1 on speed. For a one-off bug clip due in five minutes, waiting on AV1 rarely makes sense.

Decode matters for clients: an AV1 file that looks great on your laptop may stutter on a 2015 conference room PC.

Test playback on the oldest machine in your audience before standardizing on AV1 for internal hosting. A stuttery all-hands recording wastes more time than a slightly larger H.264 file.

What to export for your own files

Practical defaults:

Goal	Suggested export
Email, Slack, generic upload	H.264, 720p or 1080p, MP4
Apple-centric team, modern hardware	HEVC in MOV or MP4
Web archive you self-host with modern players	VP9 or AV1 in WebM if you tested playback; see optimize video for web on Mac
Master for editing	High bitrate H.264/HEVC or camera native

Match bitrate guidance and platform limits such as YouTube upload size before chasing the newest codec. When a stakeholder cannot play HEVC, convert HEVC to H.264 on Mac is faster than experimenting with AV1 encode times.

Using GetCompress

GetCompress optimizes for codecs your recipients can play without thinking: H.264, HEVC, and common containers like MP4 and MOV. Compress locally, preview before export, set target file size, and batch folders. When streaming platforms re-encode to VP9 or AV1 anyway, a clean H.264 mezzanine upload is still the reliable creator workflow.