Intel has supported native hardware decoder for AV1 since Tiger Lake. That’s quite old. You could buy a used NUC with Tiger Lake. Even when new a NUC with 1115G4 or 1135G7 isn’t expensive. I found one with damaged WiFi for $20. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366767313411 You can buy it now.
I went to the link to buy a computer (a NUC11TNKi3) with this capability for $20, but all it would let me do is place a bid on it; I cannot buy it now.
Cheaper to get a long fiber optic HDMI cable and connect your TV to your PC GPU. That's what I do. You get the best uncompressed video (typ 4K 120Hz or 8K 60Hz), zero lag so it can be used for stuff other than video, and don't have to maintain another box
Lots of media devices that don't have AV1 decoders tend to have issues decoding high resolution AV1 in real time so you either get pauses to buffer or dropped frames.
Nvidia Shield is hardly the most popular anything. Roku has 43% of the market and Amazon has 35%.
Would be interesting to see if we could segment third-party from TV-embedded (see quote), but the metrics from the article seem to reflect actual consumer usage, as most consumers just use what comes in the TV they buy nowadays.
> This reflects a consolidated approach and eliminates yet another device in the home, and it’s catching on, as just 34% consider streaming media players as their primary viewing device. Meanwhile, 56% said the same for smart TVs.
Very fair. Looks like Amazon is a bit better with AV1 support starting in 2021 with the Fire TV Stick 4k Max - 1st Gen[0], with a single absense of it on the seemingly uber-budget friendly $35 "Fire TV Stick HD Alexa Voice Remote (2024)".
That's still a sliver of the market, but the more royalty-free* codecs we use, the better.
>> The NVIDIA Shield TV (Pro and Tube) is widely considered the best Android TV streaming device for self-hosted media servers in 2026. While the Apple TV 4K wins on UI polish and the Onn 4K Pro wins on price, the Shield wins on something most other devices can't match: lossless audio bitstream passthrough. TrueHD, TrueHD Atmos, DTS-HD MA, DTS:X - the Shield passes them all to your AV receiver untouched.
>> Combined with hardware decode for H.264, H.265, VP9, and AV1, plus an 8-year-old Tegra X1+ chip that still gets driver updates, the Shield is a genuine "set it and forget it" Jellyfin client.
Nvidia shield is a device that simply works and passes the audio untouched to my sound receiver and I enjoy it __everyday__.
Nvidia hasn't released a new model of the Shield since 2019. The current Apple TV model, Google TV model, Roku model, Fire TV, and Onn models support AV1.
The Shield is dead though and a long-time abandoned, right?
I remember the Shield going from fantastic to a horrible mess software wise over the span of a single Android generation (maybe 2019 or 2020), constant ARC weirdness, etc.
Shield is a 10 year old device at this point. It's essentially the 2017 hw that they've refreshed a couple of times with minor changes. Wait for the actual shield next for proper support.
Sorry, but YouTube began thermal throttling on a Firestick the moment they started forcing AV1 regardless of the presence of on-device hardware support.
If the common hardware customers already have fails when you attempt to use a newer codec (but works fine otherwise), that can't be said to be a mainstream codec yet.
Your particular model is not representative of "the common hardware" as a whole. And it can be mainstream even when a significant fraction of devices can't use it. AV1 is a third of Netflix streams and most YouTube streams, that's more than enough to qualify as mainstream.
Even if half the devices were broken, it would still be more than a third of streams and mainstream.
A lot less than half of devices are broken when playing YouTube, I assure you.
If they stopped forcing it, it would still be the best choice most of the time. It doesn't "have to be" forced to be a major choice. The forcing changes the exact percentage but not the overall picture.
AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size, individually or when considering both. I prefer it to h264 (or vp9 or even h265) at this point, and there isn't a particular need for hardware decode to benefit from it. On Youtube (probably the biggest and most accessible source of av1 video), when comparing size and quality on different codecs (h264/vp9/av1), av1 is either gonna have much smaller size while keeping some level of quality, or have better quality at similar size, or even have both be better.
Firesticks are quite popular. I'd like to see what percentage in the wild actually does decode AV1 in hardware, and without stuttering or buffering problems. Even my newer devices sometimes choke on h265.
The first Apple chips with AV1 support only came out in 2023. So the majority of Apple hardware out there doesn't support it. It will be a long time till support is at >95%.
If you really want to see magic, take a test sample of YUV420 video and AV1 encode it to an extremely low bitrate at like 720p, 24 fps to simulate something like the jerky handheld front-phone-cam in the example URL. Keep lowering the bitrate until the quality become unacceptable. Then compare it to the same bitrate/approx total file size in H264 and how bad it looks.
At any point in time there's only a couple video codecs you should be using. When we can repeatedly shave off 30% of video bandwidth, there's no reason to stop making one or two new ones every decade.
Edit: And you can also look at the video codec landscape as having two major standards that put out new versions sometimes. The MPEG/h.26x series and the VPx/AVx series. It's not quite that simple but it's close.
There is no need to have a final one. It's no problem to keep supporting older codecs and add new ones in new products, as long as there's a "common ground" of widely supported codecs.
I don’t think we’re far off a “final” video codec, in the sense that jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs. Sure, there are newer codecs with higher compression foot a given quality level, but at some point it’s good enough to not bother upgrading, especially when the new version costs exponentially more for negligible gain.
…maybe THIS one will be The Final Codec… doodoodoo dooo
> jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs
In popular consciousness, maybe. When people think image they thing jpg. But most websites you use aren't delivering images as jpg. Most sites care about saving money on bandwidth and their site loading fast, and because of that they tend to use webp and avif, which are much smaller for the same quality.
jpg: webp, avif, jxl. The first two are adopted because of non-negligible gains, the latter because of features missing in jpg.
mp3: Both AAC and opus have non-negligible gains and both are fairly widely used.
zip[1]: lz4, zstd, and lzma2 dominate at least gzip's implementation of deflate: For any given setting of gzip, there is a setting for at least one of those three that is both faster and smaller.
1: Not a codec; the zip format specifies a dozen methods for encoding. I'm assuming you mean Deflate, which is the most common compression method associated with zip.
Re: mp3, Opus is a pretty big improvement. In my experience I've found that Opus is pretty reliably transparent at 96kbit/s, whereas LAME (which really squeezes mp3 for all it's got) needs ~130kbit/s
I think encode costs are higher (although I'm struggling to find any actual data) but in my experience this is totally negligible in practice.
Of course, don't go converting all your mp3s to Opus, but if you're running a music streaming server or whatever, Opus is pretty sweet... and probably close to "as good as it gets" until/unless we figure out some crazy new tricks.
Yes, "neural" or "learned" video codecs are considered the future. They already have competitive compression ratios, but last thing I heard was that they are still much slower than conventional codecs.
That's all well and good, but let me know when I can buy a used $50 NUC or pi or such that has hw decoding of the same for my TV front ends.
Intel has supported native hardware decoder for AV1 since Tiger Lake. That’s quite old. You could buy a used NUC with Tiger Lake. Even when new a NUC with 1115G4 or 1135G7 isn’t expensive. I found one with damaged WiFi for $20. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366767313411 You can buy it now.
I went to the link to buy a computer (a NUC11TNKi3) with this capability for $20, but all it would let me do is place a bid on it; I cannot buy it now.
It looks like they normally sell for around $200: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=NUC11TNKi3&LH_Sold=1
Cheaper to get a long fiber optic HDMI cable and connect your TV to your PC GPU. That's what I do. You get the best uncompressed video (typ 4K 120Hz or 8K 60Hz), zero lag so it can be used for stuff other than video, and don't have to maintain another box
Do you really care if your NUC uses an extra 2 watts to do software decoding?
Lots of media devices that don't have AV1 decoders tend to have issues decoding high resolution AV1 in real time so you either get pauses to buffer or dropped frames.
Yes but if it says "NUC" I doubt you'll have that issue.
And maybe ten more and enough hardware will support it that it will be mainstream.
AV1? It's mainstream already. Lots of hardware supports it and you don't need hardware support for many other cases.
Mainstream? The most popular hardware streaming device (Nvidia shield) does not even support it, so I wouldnt call it mainstream.
Nvidia Shield is hardly the most popular anything. Roku has 43% of the market and Amazon has 35%.
Would be interesting to see if we could segment third-party from TV-embedded (see quote), but the metrics from the article seem to reflect actual consumer usage, as most consumers just use what comes in the TV they buy nowadays.
> This reflects a consolidated approach and eliminates yet another device in the home, and it’s catching on, as just 34% consider streaming media players as their primary viewing device. Meanwhile, 56% said the same for smart TVs.
https://www.cepro.com/news/roku-amazon-lead-streaming-media-...
Interesting you bring up Roku as a main comparison, as only the Roku Ultra device has AV1 support and that is via DASH only:
https://developer.roku.com/dev/docs/media
So if you are saying Roku has 43% of the market, I would consider that as support for my point that AV1 is not that widely supported.
Very fair. Looks like Amazon is a bit better with AV1 support starting in 2021 with the Fire TV Stick 4k Max - 1st Gen[0], with a single absense of it on the seemingly uber-budget friendly $35 "Fire TV Stick HD Alexa Voice Remote (2024)".
That's still a sliver of the market, but the more royalty-free* codecs we use, the better.
0: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/device-specs/device-specif...
*: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...
> Nvidia Shield is hardly the most popular anything.
This is so wrong..
> From Jellyfin blog: https://jellywatch.app/blog/jellyfin-nvidia-shield-tv-setup-...
>> The NVIDIA Shield TV (Pro and Tube) is widely considered the best Android TV streaming device for self-hosted media servers in 2026. While the Apple TV 4K wins on UI polish and the Onn 4K Pro wins on price, the Shield wins on something most other devices can't match: lossless audio bitstream passthrough. TrueHD, TrueHD Atmos, DTS-HD MA, DTS:X - the Shield passes them all to your AV receiver untouched.
>> Combined with hardware decode for H.264, H.265, VP9, and AV1, plus an 8-year-old Tegra X1+ chip that still gets driver updates, the Shield is a genuine "set it and forget it" Jellyfin client.
Nvidia shield is a device that simply works and passes the audio untouched to my sound receiver and I enjoy it __everyday__.
EDIT: <trying to fix formatting>
the jellyfin quotes are saying "best", which is significantly different from "most popular", which is what judge2020 said.
Nvidia hasn't released a new model of the Shield since 2019. The current Apple TV model, Google TV model, Roku model, Fire TV, and Onn models support AV1.
I would not consider the ancient Nvidia shield the "most popular" streaming device.
The Shield is dead though and a long-time abandoned, right?
I remember the Shield going from fantastic to a horrible mess software wise over the span of a single Android generation (maybe 2019 or 2020), constant ARC weirdness, etc.
Last official update was in February this year, so not really abandoned.
But no new models since 2019.
You can’t be serious, I bet 9 out of 10 owners of streaming devices haven’t even heard of the Nvidia Shield.
Shield is a 10 year old device at this point. It's essentially the 2017 hw that they've refreshed a couple of times with minor changes. Wait for the actual shield next for proper support.
My $100 NUC has AV1 hardware decoder support.
Maybe a device from 2019 is a bad data point
Niche luxury products aren't exactly mainstream either
I guess it depends on your definition of the words niche and luxury.
av1_nvenc exists therefore it's mainstream :)
Isn't the latest shield hardware 7 year old at this point? Only one year newer than AV1 itself
Sorry, but YouTube began thermal throttling on a Firestick the moment they started forcing AV1 regardless of the presence of on-device hardware support.
>forcing AV1 regardless of the presence of on-device hardware support
I'm posting from a machine without AV1 acceleration. I disabled AV1 in Firefox's about:config and Youtube falls back to VP9.
Then that particular model doesn't support it properly. I don't think that changes my point.
If the common hardware customers already have fails when you attempt to use a newer codec (but works fine otherwise), that can't be said to be a mainstream codec yet.
Your particular model is not representative of "the common hardware" as a whole. And it can be mainstream even when a significant fraction of devices can't use it. AV1 is a third of Netflix streams and most YouTube streams, that's more than enough to qualify as mainstream.
It's on most of YouTube streams because Google forces it on devices that lack hardware support, even if it breaks the functionality of the device.
Mainstream support doesn't have to be forced.
Even if half the devices were broken, it would still be more than a third of streams and mainstream.
A lot less than half of devices are broken when playing YouTube, I assure you.
If they stopped forcing it, it would still be the best choice most of the time. It doesn't "have to be" forced to be a major choice. The forcing changes the exact percentage but not the overall picture.
AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size, individually or when considering both. I prefer it to h264 (or vp9 or even h265) at this point, and there isn't a particular need for hardware decode to benefit from it. On Youtube (probably the biggest and most accessible source of av1 video), when comparing size and quality on different codecs (h264/vp9/av1), av1 is either gonna have much smaller size while keeping some level of quality, or have better quality at similar size, or even have both be better.
Firesticks are quite popular. I'd like to see what percentage in the wild actually does decode AV1 in hardware, and without stuttering or buffering problems. Even my newer devices sometimes choke on h265.
I had an iphone 13 and av1 playback was pretty bad, could technically be done with some apps but never worked well. New iphone it works quite well.
[dead]
The first Apple chips with AV1 support only came out in 2023. So the majority of Apple hardware out there doesn't support it. It will be a long time till support is at >95%.
I’ve found that YouTube just uses it anyway in software decoding. 4k AV1 video seems to use about 10% cpu on my M1.
2018 AV1 demo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127
If you really want to see magic, take a test sample of YUV420 video and AV1 encode it to an extremely low bitrate at like 720p, 24 fps to simulate something like the jerky handheld front-phone-cam in the example URL. Keep lowering the bitrate until the quality become unacceptable. Then compare it to the same bitrate/approx total file size in H264 and how bad it looks.
We need one final video codec.
Otherwise we will have this:
https://xkcd.com/927/
At any point in time there's only a couple video codecs you should be using. When we can repeatedly shave off 30% of video bandwidth, there's no reason to stop making one or two new ones every decade.
Edit: And you can also look at the video codec landscape as having two major standards that put out new versions sometimes. The MPEG/h.26x series and the VPx/AVx series. It's not quite that simple but it's close.
There is no need to have a final one. It's no problem to keep supporting older codecs and add new ones in new products, as long as there's a "common ground" of widely supported codecs.
I don’t think we’re far off a “final” video codec, in the sense that jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs. Sure, there are newer codecs with higher compression foot a given quality level, but at some point it’s good enough to not bother upgrading, especially when the new version costs exponentially more for negligible gain.
…maybe THIS one will be The Final Codec… doodoodoo dooo
> jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs
In popular consciousness, maybe. When people think image they thing jpg. But most websites you use aren't delivering images as jpg. Most sites care about saving money on bandwidth and their site loading fast, and because of that they tend to use webp and avif, which are much smaller for the same quality.
jpg: webp, avif, jxl. The first two are adopted because of non-negligible gains, the latter because of features missing in jpg.
mp3: Both AAC and opus have non-negligible gains and both are fairly widely used.
zip[1]: lz4, zstd, and lzma2 dominate at least gzip's implementation of deflate: For any given setting of gzip, there is a setting for at least one of those three that is both faster and smaller.
1: Not a codec; the zip format specifies a dozen methods for encoding. I'm assuming you mean Deflate, which is the most common compression method associated with zip.
Re: mp3, Opus is a pretty big improvement. In my experience I've found that Opus is pretty reliably transparent at 96kbit/s, whereas LAME (which really squeezes mp3 for all it's got) needs ~130kbit/s
I think encode costs are higher (although I'm struggling to find any actual data) but in my experience this is totally negligible in practice.
Of course, don't go converting all your mp3s to Opus, but if you're running a music streaming server or whatever, Opus is pretty sweet... and probably close to "as good as it gets" until/unless we figure out some crazy new tricks.
I feel as though AI is going to blow these all out of the water soon.
And then we'll get AI-designed hardware codecs for them.
Or the AI will be the codec - intelligence is compression.
Yes, "neural" or "learned" video codecs are considered the future. They already have competitive compression ratios, but last thing I heard was that they are still much slower than conventional codecs.