AV1 is an open-source, royalty-free video encoding format that is used on YouTube for better compression, without quality loss, than VP9. It was developed by the Alliance for Open Media and was introduced on YouTube in 2018.
However, AV1 is used more for standard definition videos (up to 480p) rather than HD (720p, 1080p) because of the processing demands.
In YouTube, you can set your preferences to stream/download in AV1 as a preference or default setting (depending on the internet bandwidth available).
As your preference, AV1 can be set for SD (up to 480p resolution) but will use VP9 for higher-resolution videos. (See screenshots below.)
Although, as YouTube mentions as a pop-up in the preferences, streaming in AV1 in HD (720p, 1080p) is not available for all videos and requires a more powerful computer processor.
If the processor is not powerful enough to handle AV1, it could result in choppy or slowed playback of video at higher resolutions.
It’s interesting to note that the AVIF image file format uses AV1 compression algorithms.
AV1 Preferences On YouTube
