Android smartphones will play videos better with poor internet
Google will force AV1 codec support to be built in
Android 14 may require smartphones to support AV1 video decoding. This codec significantly reduces traffic consumption when watching online video. In some cases, a video compressed with AV1 can ‘weigh’ half as much as a video compressed with today’s popular codecs.
AV1 is a codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. It is a free codec with significant bandwidth savings compared to VP9 and H264.
In 2018, Facebook Engineering conducted tests concluding that the AV1 benchmark encoder achieved 34%, 46.2%, and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 High profile, and x264 Main profile, respectively. This is a huge improvement for situations where you want to watch a video, but the mobile network or Wi-Fi does not provide much bandwidth.
Evidence that AV1 will be mandatory for future smartphones running Android 14 comes from the AOSP project code. The first commit we noticed adds AV1 encoding to VideoCodecTest in the Android Compatibility Test Suite, or CTS. CTS is an automated test suite that checks compatibility with an Android OS version. If a device does not meet Android CDD requirements, it may not meet Google’s CTS, which in turn may result in Google services not being built into the smartphone.
The second commit adds AV1 to the list of codecs the device should be able to decode. This commit directly references the unpublished CDD for Android 14. Google will publish this document shortly before Android 14 is released.
Today, there are many flagship smartphones that do not yet support AV1 decoding. This applies, for example, to any device with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. At the time, the Samsung Galaxy S22 variant with an Exynos processor can decode AV1.
It is not yet known whether the smartphone will be required to have hardware support for the AV1 codec. Hardware support will allow you to play videos with minimal battery consumption. If the playback happens programmatically, it will increase the load on the processor and increase the battery consumption. The decoding test only checks that the device can decode a single frame of AV1 video, and does not use a hardware or software decoder.
