For those who came in late AV1 is the web's next open, royalty-free video codec, but it needs hardware support from the world's chip vendors.

Qualcomm's 2022 flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, doesn't support AV1 but Samsung's Exynos 2200 and the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 SoC do.

Amusingly Apple is a founding member of the AV1 Alliance, but its devices don't support the codec yet.

Now it seems that Qualcomm's "upcoming flagship Snapdragon mobile processor" -- model number "SM8550" -- will support AV1. That would probably be called the "Snapdragon 8 Gen 2" SoC, due out in 2023.

Adoption of AV1 seems inevitable, though it is taking longer than expected.

The codec is a successor to Google's VP8 and VP9 codecs and is being built by the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance's lineup is a who's who of tech companies, with founding members like Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung.

Netflix and Google's YouTube are both making AV1 support "a requirement" for future products that want to support either video service. That should motivate just about every hardware and software vendor out to adopt it.

The newer AV1 codec also has the benefit of being 30 per cent more efficient than H.265.