Android 14 may require smartphones to have AV1 decoding support, as per commitments in AOSP Gerrit.
AV1 is a codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, and is a royalty-free codec with significant bandwidth savings over both VP9 and H264. Facebook Engineering ran tests in 2018, and concluded that the AV1 reference encoder achieved 34%, 46.2%, and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 High Profile, and x264 Main Profile, respectively. This is a huge improvement for people who may rely on slower connections, or if you’re a company that runs a major video service like YouTube, it can translate to significant cost savings. This is why the fact that Android 14 may require hardware AV1 decoding support isn’t a huge surprise.
The proof of AV1 being committed in devices running Android 14 comes via a pair of commits on AOSP Gerrit. The first commit, which we found, adds the AV1 encoder to VideoCodecTest in the Android Compatibility Test Suite, or CTS. CTS is an automated set of tests that checks for compatibility with your version of the Android operating system. If the device fails to meet the requirements described in the Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD), Google’s CTS may fail – which in turn may result in a loss of access to the Google suite of apps.
Besides, a second commit has been spotted Asper Adds AV1 to the list of codecs that the device must be able to decode in order to pass. What’s particularly interesting about this commit is that it directly references the unreleased CDD for Android 14, a document that Google hasn’t published yet and won’t publish until shortly before the release of Android 14.
According to android cdd 14, sec 2.2.2 and sec 2.6,
Mobile and tablet apps must support AV1 decoding
There are still a lot of flagship smartphones that do not support AV1 decoding yet, like any device with the first generation Snapdragon 8 processor. Funnily enough, the Exynos variant of the Samsung Galaxy S22 can decode AV1 but the Snapdragon variant can’t, and it would be strange for Google to prevent OEMs from updating their devices to Android 14 based on AV1 compatibility, especially since the latest generation of readily available flagship chips didn’t. AV1 is supported except for the less popular options like MediaTek and Exynos.
There are a couple of possible takeaways as to what all this means, assuming that Google definitely goes ahead with making AV1 decryption and encryption mandatory in some way. It would be that only devices running Android 14 would be required to support AV1 (which makes sense, since Qualcomm, which has been around for a long time with AV1, supports it even with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) or alternatively, devices can decode and encrypt via the program. Such as Asper It states that the decoding test only checks whether the device can decode a single frame of AV1 video and not whether it uses a hardware or software decoder.
Regardless, this paves the way for the spread of AV1 streaming across mobile devices. As smartphones support the codec more and more, streaming platforms will be able to implement it with confidence to not only save costs on bandwidth on their end but to help users who may have limited data connections as well. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this article if we hear it, and we’ll watch and wait to see how this development shapes up.
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