The tech for smaller video files is here, but your new phone won’t have it

The tech for smaller video files is here, but your new phone won’t have it

Credit: Qualcomm
A Qualcomm representative suggested that the company will skip AV1 encoding.
The representative hinted that Qualcomm could skip to VVC encoding instead.
This will allow for much smaller file sizes when recording video on mobile.

Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset in November 2022, and it’s powering the top-end smartphones from a variety of brands. One notable multimedia-related addition is AV1 decode/playback support.

Why AV1 playback matters

The AV1 codec is a royalty-free, open-source video codec that offers better video quality and up to 30% smaller file sizes than the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) used by many companies and content services today. More specifically, you should expect either the same quality with the smaller file size or better quality for the same file size.