Budget Android phones will soon get better at playing AV1 videos

The chipset on our phones matter. Obviously a more powerful processor means being able to handle more intensive tasks, such as photo or video taking and editing, playing games, and so on. But it can also have an impact when it comes to video playback. For those who are using budget phones, an upcoming Android update will make it better when playing AV1 videos.

According to a report from Android Authority, it seems that a future Android update will see Google change its video decoder software. Android currently ships with Google’s libgav1 AV1 software decoder. The update will change it to VideoLAN’s libdav1d decoder. Based on the test that the publication conducted, the improvements are huge.

For those unfamiliar, AV1 is a video codec used by a number of streaming services. There are many codecs available out there, such as h.264 and h265, but those require royalties. AV1 does not. It also offers similar quality at a lower bitrate, which allows for faster streaming and lower data consumption.

The problem is that AV1 decoding usually requires a hardware-accelerated decoder. Since not many phones ship with it, software decoders are an alternative. This in turn requires quite a bit of CPU power, which is why lower-end devices tend to suffer a bit. We imagine that eventually hardware-accelerated decoders will become a standard feature in the future, but for now, Google updating their AV1 software decoder is a good alternative, especially for budget Android phones.