AOMedia Video 2 (AV2) is an open, royalty-free video coding format developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a non-profit technology development consortium. It is the successor to their existing and widely deployed AV1 encoding format, and is designed to deliver better compression performance, enhanced support for AR, VR and split-screen usage and support for a wider visual quality range. AV2 development work started in 2020, two years after the release of AV1. It was released on 28 May 2026. AV2 uses an overall encoding framework that is similar to that of AV1, but with significant innovations in every part of that framework. These include extended recursive partitioning, changes to transform block partitioning, semi-decoupled partitioning of luma and chroma, improvements to intra-frame prediction including chroma from luma, and new modes for inter-frame prediction. The Alliance for Open Media previously stated that AV2 will formally be released at the end of 2025, with hardware implementations expected in 2026. At CES 2026, VLC 4.0 was demonstrated playing AV2 on a MacBook Pro. On 9 June 2026 they announced AV2 in a blog post. AV2 will compete with the royalty-based format VVC for adoption in the market, in a way similar to the competition between the earlier generation HEVC and AV1 formats. As of 2025, prototype AV2 implementations show around 30% lower bitrate over AV1 at similar visual quality, and AV2 is expected to offer similar performance to VVC overall.
Adoption
Hardware
Software AVM (AOM Video Model) – reference software for AV2 format from Alliance for Open Media dav2d – AV2 decoder developed by VideoLAN targeted to be small, portable and very fast
Patent claims Even though it had not yet been released as of 14 January 2026, the Luxembourg-based non-practicing entity Sisvel had already announced plans to establish a patent pool, as it did for AV1.
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