Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams: Here are 10 things I found

Summary

Alright, pull up a chair. We need to talk about AV1. The codec wars are a special kind of hell. For anyone who’s ever worked in video engineering, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a multi-decade, billion-dollar street fight over bytes and pixels, waged in the esoteric battlegrounds of DCT blocks and entropy coding. We argue endlessly about H.264’s ubiquity, HEVC’s licensing nightmare, and the mythical potential of the “next big thing.” For years, we’ve been promised a streaming messiah. A codec that would deliver pristine 4K, slay the buffering dragon, and magically shrink our data bills. The industry anointed AV1 as the chosen one, the open-source hero that would free us from the licensing labyrinth of H.265/HEVC. Most of the time, a new codec offers a modest, almost boring improvement. You get a 15-20% bump in efficiency, you write some blog posts, and life goes on. It’s evolution, not revolution. Netflix, being Netflix, was one of the first to roll it out at scale. But is it actually any good? Or is it just another line item in a press release? I decided to find out. Armed with a Fire TV, a MacBook, the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), and a level of patience only attainable after debugging a newborn’s requirement at 3 AM, I spent multiple weekends capturing and analyzing every bit Netflix sent my way. The assumption is simple: AV1, being newer, must be more efficient. And it is. But the real story, the one that matters to engineers and anyone who hates seeing a spinning circle, is far more interesting. It turns out that for some content, AV1 is so obsessed with quality it actually uses more data than its predecessor. Yes, you read that right. Let’s get into it. TL;DR - The Numbers Don’t Lie# Before we dive deep, here’s the high-level summary. Up to 55% bandwidth savings on blockbuster movies. Peak bitrate spikes often cut in half during action scenes (goodbye, buffering). 50% more Netflix hours per month on your phone’s data plan. Netflix’s wallet: My back-of-th...