AV1 vs H.265 (HEVC): Which Video Codec Is Better in 2026?
AV1 is 30–50% more efficient than H.265 and completely royalty-free — but H.265 still wins on encoding speed and hardware support. Here's the full breakdown.
AV1 vs H.265 (HEVC): Which Video Codec Is Better in 2026?
The codec landscape has never been more consequential. Storage costs money, bandwidth costs more, and the video files you create today may need to play on devices that don't exist yet. The AV1 vs H.265 debate sits at the center of that conversation — two technically impressive codecs with very different philosophies, licensing models, and adoption trajectories.
H.265 (also called HEVC — High Efficiency Video Coding) has been the gold standard for efficient video compression since 2013. AV1, released by the Alliance for Open Media in 2018, was built to surpass it — and to do so without royalty fees. Both deliver significantly better compression than the aging H.264 standard, but they make very different tradeoffs.
This guide breaks down every meaningful dimension of the AV1 vs H.265 comparison: compression efficiency, encoding speed, hardware support, browser compatibility, licensing, and practical use cases. We'll also cover how macOS handles both codecs and where each one is headed.
If you're coming from the basics, see our guides on what a video codec is and what video encoding actually does before diving in.
What Is H.265 (HEVC)?
H.265, officially named HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), is the successor to H.264 standardized by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC joint committee in 2013. It was designed from the ground up to handle the demands of 4K and 8K video — resolutions where H.264's efficiency simply falls short.
The key architectural innovation in HEVC is its Coding Tree Unit (CTU) system. Unlike H.264, which divides frames into fixed 16×16 pixel macroblocks, HEVC uses variable-size CTUs ranging from 8×8 to 64×64 pixels. The encoder dynamically chooses the optimal block size for each region of each frame — small blocks for complex detail, large blocks for smooth uniform areas. This alone accounts for a substantial portion of HEVC's efficiency gains.
HEVC also extends motion compensation range significantly, meaning it can predict movement across more frames and with higher precision. Combined with more sophisticated in-loop filters that reduce compression artifacts, the result is a codec that achieves the same visual quality as H.264 at roughly half the bitrate.
For a deeper look at H.265 video compression, see our dedicated guide.
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. HEVC's fragmented, expensive licensing landscape (multiple patent pools with conflicting terms) 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 Daala and Thor — two competing open-source codec projects that merged their best ideas into AOM. The result is a codec with a dramatically larger toolbox than either H.264 or H.265:
- 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 allow AV1 to squeeze out more compression efficiency than HEVC — but they also make encoding computationally demanding.
AV1 vs H.265: Full Comparison
| Feature | AV1 | H.265 (HEVC) |
|---|---|---|
| Compression efficiency | 30–50% better than H.265 | ~50% better than H.264 |
| Encoding speed | Slow (software); improving with SVT-AV1 | Fast; excellent hardware support |
| Decoding speed | Good on hardware-supported devices | Excellent across devices |
| Hardware encode support | Limited (newest chips only) | Broad (2015+ GPUs/SoCs) |
| Hardware decode support | Growing (2020+ devices) | Broad (2015+ devices) |
| Browser support | Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari (partial) | Safari only (natively) |
| Licensing | Royalty-free (open source) | Paid (multiple patent pools) |
| Max resolution | 8K+ | 8K |
| HDR support | Yes (HDR10, Dolby Vision) | Yes (HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision) |
| Streaming adoption | YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo | Apple platforms, UHD Blu-ray |
| macOS hardware encode | No (M-series only has hardware decode) | Yes (M1 and later via VideoToolbox) |
Compression Efficiency: AV1 Wins, But by How Much?
This is the headline advantage of AV1, and it's real. Independent testing from Netflix, Facebook (Meta), and academic researchers consistently shows AV1 delivering 30–50% better compression efficiency than HEVC at equivalent visual quality — meaning the same content at the same perceived quality in a smaller file.
To put that in concrete terms: a 10-minute 4K video that compresses to 1.5 GB in HEVC might compress to 900 MB–1.05 GB in AV1. For streaming services delivering billions of minutes of video per day, that efficiency difference translates directly into reduced CDN costs and lower bandwidth consumption for users.
The efficiency gap varies by content type:
- Live action footage: AV1 typically 30–40% smaller than HEVC
- Animation and screen content: AV1 can achieve 40–60% smaller (the palette coding tools are especially effective here)
- High-motion sports content: AV1's advantage narrows to 20–30%
HEVC itself already represents a significant leap over H.264 — roughly 40–50% smaller files at equivalent quality. So compared to H.264, AV1 is roughly 50–70% more efficient. The compound savings over archaic H.264 libraries are enormous.
For practical tools to estimate file sizes across different codecs, see our video file size calculator.
Encoding Speed: H.265 Still Leads
This is where H.265 has a decisive advantage in 2026 — and where many people who've tried AV1 encoding have encountered frustration.
H.265 encoding benefits from a decade of hardware implementation. Apple's VideoToolbox on M1 and later chips includes a dedicated HEVC encoder block that runs at near-real-time speeds. A 10-minute 4K video that would take hours to encode in software can encode in minutes on an M-series Mac.
AV1 encoding in software is brutally slow. A reference libaom-av1 encode at high quality settings on a modern Mac can take 10–50x longer than an equivalent HEVC encode. This is the primary practical barrier to AV1 adoption in production workflows.
The situation is improving, primarily through SVT-AV1 (Scalable Video Technology for AV1), Intel's open-source AV1 encoder that achieves dramatically better encoding throughput through parallelism and architectural optimizations. FFmpeg integrated SVT-AV1 support, and at speed preset 4–6 (on a scale of 0–13), SVT-AV1 produces AV1 files at speeds approaching HEVC software encoding, with quality that's still better than HEVC at equivalent file sizes.
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 Mac users in 2026, HEVC hardware encoding through VideoToolbox remains the practical choice for any workflow where speed matters.
Hardware Support and Device Compatibility
H.265 hardware support is now broadly mature:
- Apple Silicon M1 and later: hardware encode and decode
- iPhone 7 and later: hardware HEVC encode and decode
- Most Android phones since 2017
- GPUs dating to NVIDIA Maxwell (2014), AMD Polaris (2016), Intel Kaby Lake (2016)
- Smart TVs and streaming devices from 2016 onward
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 newer 2022+ models
The practical implication: if you're creating AV1 content, a large portion of potential viewers may be decoding it in software, which is fine for desktop computers but can affect playback smoothness on older phones or low-power devices.
Licensing: AV1 Is Royalty-Free, HEVC Is Not
This is one of the most consequential differences between the two codecs, even if it's invisible to end users.
HEVC licensing is fragmented across three separate patent pools: MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media. Combined royalty costs for device manufacturers implementing HEVC can run to several dollars per device, and the terms across pools are inconsistent. This fragmentation caused Google and Mozilla to initially avoid implementing HEVC on the web platform — they pushed for AV1 instead precisely to escape this licensing complexity.
For Mac users and application developers, Apple has licensed HEVC for macOS and iOS, so there's no direct cost. But the ecosystem-level friction has real downstream effects: it's why HEVC never achieved the same universal web browser support that H.264 has, despite being technically superior.
AV1 is completely royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media's member companies have 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 why Google (YouTube), Netflix, Meta, and Microsoft have all invested heavily in AV1 — the economics are fundamentally better for large-scale deployment.
Browser and Platform Support
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+)
HEVC browser support:
- Safari: full hardware-accelerated support
- Chrome, Firefox, Edge: limited — Chrome added HEVC support behind a flag, full support arrived in Chrome 107 (2022) on platforms with hardware decode
- Cross-browser HEVC playback remains unreliable on Windows without codec packs
The irony: on the web, AV1 has broader guaranteed support than HEVC — the opposite of what you'd expect given HEVC's head start. YouTube's decision to default AV1 for capable devices has made AV1 the de facto streaming codec for the modern web.
Use Cases: When to Choose AV1 vs H.265
Choose AV1 when:
- You're delivering video for web streaming (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, batch processing overnight)
- You're encoding with SVT-AV1 or a hardware AV1 encoder
- Licensing costs matter for your deployment at scale
Choose H.265 (HEVC) when:
- You need fast encoding — especially on Mac with Apple Silicon
- You're working within the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Final Cut Pro)
- You're shooting 4K or 8K footage that needs immediate processing
- You're archiving video and want broad playback compatibility on Apple devices
- You're using Compresto or any app that leverages VideoToolbox for hardware-accelerated compression
- Encoding speed is more important than squeezing out the last 20% of compression efficiency
For general-audience web distribution, both are viable in 2026, but AV1 is the forward-looking choice. For Mac-centric workflows where speed matters, HEVC is the practical winner.
You may also find our comparison of H.264 vs H.265 and HEVC vs H.264 useful for understanding where each codec fits in the full hierarchy.
How Compresto Handles Video Codecs on macOS
Compresto is built specifically for the Mac video compression workflow, and it leverages Apple's VideoToolbox framework for hardware-accelerated encoding. On M1 and later Macs, this means HEVC encoding is handled by the dedicated media engine — not the CPU or GPU — resulting in fast, efficient encodes that don't slow down your other work.
For a 10-minute 4K video, Compresto can complete an HEVC encode in a few minutes on Apple Silicon, producing a file roughly 40–50% smaller than the original without perceptible quality loss. That's the combination of VideoToolbox's hardware speed and HEVC's compression efficiency working together.
On the AV1 side: because Apple Silicon currently provides hardware AV1 decode but not encode, Compresto uses HEVC as its primary video output format. This is the right call — users get hardware-accelerated speeds with excellent compression results. As hardware AV1 encoding support matures on Apple platforms, that may change.
Compresto also handles batch video compression, processing entire folders automatically. If you're managing a large video archive on Mac, this is significantly faster than running FFmpeg manually for each file.
Future Outlook: AV2 on the Horizon
The codec roadmap doesn't stop at AV1. The Alliance for Open Media has begun preliminary work on AV2, the successor to AV1. Early research papers suggest AV2 could deliver another 20–30% efficiency gain over AV1 — which would make it roughly 60–80% more efficient than H.265.
On the HEVC successor side, VVC (Versatile Video Coding), also called H.266, was standardized in 2020. VVC offers approximately 50% better compression than HEVC, but it carries even more complex licensing than its predecessor — the same fragmented patent pool problem that slowed HEVC adoption, amplified. Early adoption has been slow as a result.
The most likely scenario for 2027–2030: AV1 becomes the dominant web streaming codec (displacing H.264), HEVC remains the dominant format for device capture and Apple ecosystem workflows, and AV2 begins appearing in streaming infrastructure. VVC may find niche adoption in broadcast and UHD distribution where licensing terms can be negotiated.
For practical compression work today, the HEVC vs AV1 choice is the one that matters — and the answer depends on your specific workflow, hardware, and delivery target.
FAQ: AV1 vs H.265
Q: Is AV1 better than H.265 for video quality?
At the same file size, yes — AV1 generally delivers better visual quality than H.265 due to its 30–50% compression efficiency advantage. At the same bitrate, an AV1-encoded video will typically look noticeably better than an HEVC encode. The tradeoff is encoding time: producing that AV1 file takes significantly longer unless you have hardware AV1 encoding support.
Q: Can I play AV1 videos on a Mac?
Yes. Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 and later) include hardware AV1 decode, so AV1 playback is smooth and power-efficient. On Intel Macs, AV1 decodes in software, which works but uses more CPU. QuickTime Player on macOS 13 Ventura and later supports AV1 playback natively on Apple Silicon.
Q: Why does YouTube use AV1 instead of H.265?
Licensing and economics. AV1 is royalty-free, which means Google pays nothing to encode and stream AV1 content at scale. HEVC requires royalty payments to multiple patent pools — at YouTube's volume, that's a significant ongoing cost. AV1 also delivers better compression, reducing CDN bandwidth costs. For Google, AV1 wins on both dimensions.
Q: Is H.265 still worth using in 2026?
Absolutely. For Mac users especially, HEVC encoded via VideoToolbox hardware acceleration is fast, produces excellent results, and plays natively across all Apple devices. For recording, archiving, and sharing within Apple ecosystems, H.265 remains the practical first choice. AV1 is more efficient, but the encoding speed disadvantage on Apple hardware makes it a secondary option for most Mac workflows right now.
Q: What is HEVC vs AV1 encoding speed difference?
On a Mac with Apple Silicon using hardware acceleration, HEVC encodes at near-real-time or faster. AV1 software encoding (libaom) on the same machine runs 10–50x slower. SVT-AV1 narrows this gap significantly in software, and hardware AV1 encoders (NVIDIA RTX 40-series, Intel Arc) bring speeds close to HEVC — but neither is available on current Apple Silicon. For speed on Mac, HEVC wins decisively.
Download Compresto for Mac and compress your video library with hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding — fast encodes, dramatically smaller files, no quality loss.