AV1 vs H.264: Which Video Codec Should You Use in 2026?

Q: Should I use AV1 or H264 for uploading to YouTube?

Upload in whichever your machine encodes fastest and at high quality — usually H.264 or HEVC on a Mac. YouTube re-encodes everything you upload, and it will generate AV1 versions itself for capable viewers. There's no benefit to spending hours on a slow software AV1 encode just to upload it.

By Hieu DinhPublished June 4, 2026

AV1 vs H.264: Which Video Codec Should You Use in 2026?

Almost every video file you've ever shared, uploaded, or downloaded was probably H.264. It's the codec that quietly powers YouTube uploads, video calls, screen recordings, and the clips on your phone. But a newer codec — AV1 — promises to cut those file sizes nearly in half. So the AV1 vs H264 question comes down to a real tradeoff: do you want the codec that plays everywhere and encodes instantly, or the one that produces dramatically smaller files but asks a lot more of your hardware?

H.264 (also called AVC — Advanced Video Coding) has been the universal baseline since 2003. AV1, released by the Alliance for Open Media in 2018, was built to be roughly 50% more efficient — and to do it without any royalty fees. They sit at opposite ends of the codec timeline, and they make almost opposite tradeoffs.

This guide breaks down every meaningful dimension of the AV1 vs H264 comparison: compression efficiency, encoding speed, hardware support, browser compatibility, licensing, and practical use cases. We'll also cover how macOS handles both codecs and which one actually makes sense for Mac workflows.

If you're coming from the basics, see our guide on what a video codec is before diving in.

What Is H.264 (AVC)?

H.264, officially named AVC (Advanced Video Coding), was standardized in 2003 by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC joint committee. It's the most widely deployed video codec in history — the format behind Blu-ray, broadcast TV, video conferencing, social media uploads, and the default recording format on countless cameras and phones.

The reason for that ubiquity is simple: H.264 has had over two decades to embed itself into hardware and software everywhere. Its core design divides each frame into fixed 16×16 pixel macroblocks, then uses motion prediction, transform coding, and entropy coding to compress the video efficiently for its era. Compared to the codecs before it, H.264 was a huge leap — and crucially, dedicated H.264 encode and decode hardware ships in virtually every chip made since the mid-2000s.

That maturity is its superpower. H.264 plays on essentially every device, every browser, and every editor without a second thought, and it encodes in hardware at near-instant speeds. Its weakness is efficiency: by modern standards, H.264 needs significantly more bits to reach the same visual quality as newer codecs. That's the gap AV1 was designed to close.

What Is AV1?

AV1 is an open-source, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) — a consortium founded in 2015 by Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Meta, and Intel, among others. Version 1.0 was released in 2018.

The founding motivation was partly technical and partly economic. The licensing landscape around H.264's successor, HEVC, was fragmented and expensive (multiple patent pools with conflicting terms), which created real friction for browser vendors and streaming services. AV1 offered an escape: a next-generation codec that no one would need to pay licensing fees to use.

Technically, AV1 builds on research from Google's VP9 codec and incorporates innovations from the Daala and Thor open-source codec projects. The result is a codec with a dramatically larger toolbox than H.264:

Compound prediction modes that blend multiple reference frames
Palette coding for screen content and animation
Constrained directional enhancement filtering that suppresses ringing artifacts with greater precision
Tile-based parallelism for multi-threaded encoding and decoding

These tools let AV1 squeeze out roughly 50% better compression than H.264 — but they also make encoding computationally demanding, which is the crux of the entire comparison.

AV1 vs H.264: Full Comparison

Feature	AV1	H.264 (AVC)
Compression efficiency	30–50% better than H.264	The baseline standard
Encoding speed	Slow (software); improving with SVT-AV1	Instant; near-universal hardware encode
Decoding speed	Good on hardware-supported devices	Excellent everywhere
Hardware encode support	Limited (newest chips only)	Universal (essentially all devices)
Hardware decode support	Growing (2020+ devices)	Universal
Browser support	Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari (partial)	Every browser, no exceptions
Licensing	Royalty-free (open source)	Paid (patent pool)
Max resolution	8K+	4K (practical); 8K (spec)
HDR support	Yes (HDR10, Dolby Vision)	Limited
Streaming adoption	YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo	Universal fallback / legacy
macOS hardware encode	No (Apple Silicon has decode only)	Yes (all Macs via VideoToolbox)
File size at same quality	30–50% smaller	Larger baseline

Compression Efficiency: AV1 Wins Decisively

This is the headline advantage of AV1, and against H.264 it's enormous. Independent testing from Netflix, Meta, and academic researchers consistently shows AV1 delivering 30–50% better compression efficiency than H.264 at equivalent visual quality — the same content, the same perceived quality, in a much smaller file.

To put that in concrete terms: a 10-minute 1080p video that compresses to 1 GB in H.264 might compress to 500–700 MB in AV1. For streaming services delivering billions of minutes of video per day, that efficiency gap translates directly into reduced CDN costs and lower bandwidth consumption for viewers.

The efficiency gap varies by content type:

Live action footage: AV1 typically 30–40% smaller than H.264
Animation and screen content: AV1 can achieve 50%+ smaller (the palette coding tools shine here)
High-motion sports content: AV1's advantage narrows toward 25–35%

H.264 was designed in an era of standard-definition and early HD video, so it simply wasn't built for the efficiency demands of 4K streaming. AV1's larger toolbox closes that gap and then some. If raw file size at a given quality is your only metric, AV1 wins this category without question.

For practical tools to estimate file sizes across different codecs, see our video file size calculator.

Encoding Speed: H.264 Is in a Different League

This is where H.264 has a decisive, almost unfair advantage — and where many people who've tried AV1 encoding have hit a wall.

H.264 encoding is everywhere in hardware. Apple's VideoToolbox on every Mac includes a dedicated H.264 encoder block that runs faster than real time. The same is true of practically every GPU, phone SoC, and capture device on the market. A clip that takes hours to encode in software AV1 can encode in H.264 in seconds to minutes, with zero CPU strain.

AV1 encoding in software is brutally slow by comparison. A reference libaom-av1 encode at high quality settings on a modern Mac can take 10–50x longer than an equivalent H.264 encode. This is the single biggest practical barrier to AV1 adoption in everyday creation workflows.

The situation is improving, primarily through SVT-AV1 (Scalable Video Technology for AV1), Intel's open-source AV1 encoder that achieves far better throughput through parallelism. FFmpeg integrated SVT-AV1, and at speed presets 4–6 (on a 0–13 scale) it produces AV1 files at more usable speeds while still beating H.264 on quality per byte. But even SVT-AV1 doesn't approach the instant, zero-effort speed of hardware H.264.

Hardware AV1 encoding is finally appearing in silicon, but coverage is still narrow:

NVIDIA RTX 40-series GPUs: hardware AV1 encode
Intel Arc GPUs: hardware AV1 encode
Apple Silicon: hardware AV1 decode only (no hardware AV1 encode as of M4)

For anyone who needs a video encoded now — especially on a Mac — H.264 is the speed champion by a wide margin.

Hardware Support and Device Compatibility

This category is the whole reason H.264 refuses to die.

H.264 hardware support is effectively universal:

Every Mac, ever: hardware encode and decode
Every iPhone and iPad: hardware encode and decode
Essentially all Android phones, going back well over a decade
Every modern GPU from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel
Smart TVs, set-top boxes, game consoles, webcams, dash cams, drones — all of it

AV1 hardware support is growing but still uneven:

Apple Silicon: hardware AV1 decode (M1 and later), no encode
iPhone 15 Pro and later: hardware AV1 decode
Android phones with Snapdragon 888+ or MediaTek Dimensity 1200+ (2021+): hardware decode
NVIDIA RTX 30-series (2020): hardware AV1 decode; RTX 40-series adds encode
Intel Arc (2022): hardware AV1 encode and decode
Smart TVs: limited, mostly 2022+ models

The practical implication: if you send someone an H.264 file, you can be almost certain it will play. If you send AV1, an older phone, an older TV, or an older laptop may have to decode it in software — or may not play it at all. For broad compatibility, H.264 is still the safest bet on the planet.

Licensing: AV1 Is Royalty-Free, H.264 Is Not

This difference is invisible to end users but hugely consequential for the companies building products.

H.264 licensing runs through the MPEG LA patent pool (now part of Via LA). Device manufacturers and software vendors that implement H.264 pay royalties, though caps and free tiers for low-volume distribution have kept it tolerable. Apple, Microsoft, and most major vendors have licensed H.264 broadly, which is part of why it became so universal — the terms were predictable enough for everyone to adopt it.

AV1 is completely royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media's member companies committed to not asserting patents against AV1 implementations. Any company, developer, or individual can implement AV1 encoding or decoding without paying licensing fees. This is exactly why Google (YouTube), Netflix, Meta, and Microsoft invested so heavily in AV1 — at their scale, eliminating per-stream codec costs while also reducing bandwidth is a double win.

For an individual Mac user, neither licensing model costs you anything directly. But the economics explain why AV1 exists and why the biggest streaming platforms are pushing it.

Browser and Platform Support

H.264 browser support is the one thing nothing else can match:

Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari: full support, everywhere, for years
It is the universal web video fallback — if all else fails, H.264 plays

AV1 browser support:

Chrome: full support (since Chrome 70, 2018)
Firefox: full support (since Firefox 67, 2019)
Edge: full support (Chromium-based)
Safari: partial — hardware-dependent, requires Apple Silicon with hardware AV1 decode (macOS 13+, iOS 17+)

AV1 has impressively broad browser support for a young codec, and YouTube now defaults to AV1 for capable devices. But "capable devices" is the key phrase — H.264 has no such qualifier. If you need a video that will play in any browser on any machine without checking compatibility tables, H.264 remains the guaranteed choice.

Use Cases: When to Choose AV1 vs H.264

Choose AV1 when:

You're delivering video for web streaming at scale (YouTube, Vimeo, web players)
Minimizing file size or bandwidth is the top priority
You're encoding animation, screen recordings, or UI walkthroughs
You have time for longer encodes (archival, overnight batch processing)
You're encoding with SVT-AV1 or dedicated AV1 hardware
Your viewers are on modern devices that decode AV1 in hardware

Choose H.264 when:

You need the file to play everywhere, including older devices
You need fast encoding — especially on a Mac with VideoToolbox
You're sharing clips, uploading to social platforms, or sending files to clients
You're working with editors, hardware, or workflows that expect H.264
Encoding speed and universal compatibility matter more than the last 40% of file-size savings
You're using Compresto or any app that leverages VideoToolbox for hardware-accelerated compression

The short version: AV1 is the efficiency choice; H.264 is the compatibility-and-speed choice. For modern web streaming where bandwidth dominates, lean AV1. For day-to-day creation, sharing, and Mac workflows, H.264 (and its more efficient sibling HEVC) is still the practical default.

For the codecs that sit between these two, see our comparisons of AV1 vs H.265, HEVC vs H.264, and H.264 vs H.265.

How Compresto Handles Codecs on macOS

Compresto is built specifically for the Mac compression workflow, and it leverages Apple's VideoToolbox framework for hardware-accelerated encoding. That means encoding is handled by the Mac's dedicated media engine — not the CPU grinding away — so encodes are fast and don't slow down the rest of your work.

For video output, Compresto uses H.264 and HEVC (H.265) via VideoToolbox. H.264 gives you maximum compatibility — a file that plays on virtually anything — while HEVC offers significantly smaller files for Apple-ecosystem playback. Both encode at near-real-time speeds on Apple Silicon thanks to hardware acceleration.

On the AV1 side: because Apple Silicon currently provides hardware AV1 decode but not encode, Compresto doesn't use AV1 as an output format. Encoding AV1 in software would be far slower and would defeat the whole point of hardware acceleration. So your Mac can play the AV1 videos it receives smoothly and efficiently, while Compresto produces H.264 and HEVC for fast, compatible compression. As hardware AV1 encoding matures on Apple platforms, that may change.

Compresto also handles batch video compression, processing entire folders automatically — far faster than running FFmpeg manually for each file.

Future Outlook: Where H.264 and AV1 Are Headed

H.264 isn't going anywhere soon. Its universal hardware support and guaranteed playback make it the permanent safe default for compatibility, much like JPEG never disappeared from images. For sharing, conferencing, and broad distribution, expect H.264 to remain a fixture for years.

AV1, meanwhile, is on a clear upward trajectory. As more phones, TVs, and GPUs ship with hardware AV1 encode and decode, the encoding-speed barrier will fall, and AV1 will increasingly displace H.264 for web streaming where bandwidth costs dominate. The Alliance for Open Media has also begun work on AV2, which early research suggests could deliver another 20–30% efficiency gain on top of AV1.

The most likely scenario for 2027–2030: AV1 becomes the dominant web streaming codec, H.264 remains the universal compatibility fallback and a common capture format, and HEVC holds its place in Apple-ecosystem creation workflows. For practical compression work today, the AV1 vs H264 choice still comes down to one question: do you need maximum efficiency, or do you need it to play everywhere and encode now?

FAQ: AV1 vs H.264

Q: Is AV1 better than H264?

For compression, yes — AV1 is roughly 30–50% more efficient than H.264, delivering the same visual quality in a much smaller file. But "better" depends on your goal. H.264 wins decisively on universal compatibility and encoding speed. AV1 software encoding is dramatically slower, and not every device can decode AV1 yet, while H.264 plays on essentially everything made in the last 20 years.

Q: Should I use AV1 or H264 for uploading to YouTube?

Upload in whatever your machine encodes fastest at high quality — usually H.264 or HEVC on a Mac. YouTube re-encodes every upload anyway and generates its own AV1 versions for capable viewers. Spending hours on a slow software AV1 encode just to upload it provides no benefit.

Q: Can a Mac encode AV1?

Not in hardware. Apple Silicon (M1 and later) includes hardware AV1 decode but no hardware AV1 encoder as of the M4. You can encode AV1 in software with libaom or SVT-AV1, but it's slow. For fast Mac encodes, H.264 and HEVC via VideoToolbox are the practical choices.

Q: Why is H.264 still so widely used in 2026?

Universal compatibility and instant hardware encoding. H.264 plays on virtually every browser, phone, TV, editor, and old device on the planet, and almost all silicon has had hardware H.264 encode and decode for over a decade. Nothing else matches that reach, which keeps it the safe default for sharing.

Q: How much smaller is AV1 compared to H264?

At equivalent visual quality, AV1 files are typically 30–50% smaller than H.264 — and for animation or screen recordings the gap can exceed 50%. So a 1 GB H.264 clip might land around 500–700 MB in AV1. The catch is that producing that AV1 file takes far longer unless you have dedicated AV1 encoding hardware.

New to codecs? Our what is a video codec guide covers how codecs work, hardware support, and why the format you choose matters.

Download Compresto for Mac and compress your video library with hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC encoding — fast encodes, dramatically smaller files, no quality loss.