YouTube is making a significant improvement to its video streaming technology on Android devices. This should greatly improve video quality, especially if your connection is not good.
Good news for YouTube users on Android, the platform now encodes videos in the modern AV1 video codecwhich promises significantly improved video quality, especially at lower bitrates.
Simply put, this change means YouTube users will be able to stream higher resolution videos while using less mobile data. For those watching on capped or metered data plans, this could mean less buffering and smoother streaming experiences overall.
The AV1 codec is not all good news
The advantages of AV1 are obvious, but there is a potential downside: higher battery consumption on some devices. As the AV1 codec is more advanced and complex than previous codecs such as VP9, it requires more processing power from the device to properly decode and play the video.
This computational overhead can lead to faster battery drain, especially on older Android phones and tablets that don’t have dedicated AV1 hardware decoding. Users may need to be more careful about adjusting video quality settings to find the right balance.
As first reported by Android Police, Google has confirmed the move to using the open source libdav1d decoder as Android’s default for playing AV1-encoded videos. While some recent devices running Android 12 and above have built-in AV1 decoding acceleration, others will rely solely on software decoding, which is more battery intensive.
YouTube is not the first major streaming service to adopt AV1. Netflix has already been using the advanced codec on Android for some time, with content publishers looking to take advantage of its impressive compression capabilities. For the average user, YouTube’s update to AV1 will likely be a very important addition. It will allow you to enjoy higher fidelity and video quality at the same or even lower definitions compared to streams encoded with older codecs such as VP9.