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Upcoming Android update will give AV1 videos a big boost on budget devices

Android currently ships with the libgav1 AV1 decoder, but a future update will switch that to libdav1d, which offers much better performance.

Exactly seven years ago, YouTube shared a mind-boggling statistic with the world: people are watching a billion hours of content on the platform every single day. With the sheer amount of video content these online services have to deliver on a daily basis, it’s imperative companies use the best compression technology available to save bandwidth without significantly compromising on quality. We’re finally at a point where every major mobile silicon vendor — including Qualcomm starting with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Apple with the A17 Pro — is shipping products with a hardware-accelerated AV1 decoder.

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