What Is AV1 Streaming, and Can You Actually Use It?

What AV1 Actually Is

AV1 is a video codec finalised in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium whose membership reads like a list of every company that pays for video bandwidth: Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Apple and Meta.

The defining feature is not technical, it is legal. AV1 is royalty-free, and that is the entire reason it exists. H.264 and HEVC are covered by patent pools — Via LA, Access Advance and others — and HEVC's licensing in particular fragmented into multiple pools with incompatible terms. That mess is the direct reason browser vendors never shipped HEVC playback on the open web, and the direct reason AOMedia was formed in 2015. AV1 is the industry's answer to being billed for the format it delivers billions of hours in.

Technically it succeeds VP9, Google's earlier royalty-free codec that still carries a large share of YouTube playback. Against H.264 it compresses roughly 30–40% better at equal quality; against HEVC, roughly 20% better. A successor, AV2, is already in development, which tells you how long these transitions take — AV1 is eight years old and still not something most streamers can switch on.

The framing that matters for streaming: AV1's win is not that it looks better. Fed identical bitrates and identical footage, a well-tuned AV1 encode and a well-tuned H.264 encode are both just compressed video. AV1's win is that the same picture costs less bandwidth. That is worth the most when something other than your encoder is setting the ceiling — a platform bitrate cap, or an upload connection that cannot carry more.

The Three-Part Problem: Encode, Ingest, Decode

Almost every confused question about AV1 streaming comes from treating "supports AV1" as one fact. It is three, and the lists do not match.

Encode is your machine turning frames into an AV1 bitstream. That is a property of your GPU's media engine. Ingest is the platform accepting that bitstream at its servers, which depends on both the platform and the transport protocol you reach it over. Decode is your viewer's phone, laptop or TV turning it back into pictures — and you have no control over that at all.

A spec sheet that says "AV1 supported" is usually talking about decode, which is the cheap half of the problem and shipped years earlier. That single ambiguity is responsible for most of the "my GPU supports AV1 but OBS won't offer it" threads on the internet. Each gate gets its own section below.

Can Your GPU Encode AV1?

Hardware AV1 encoding arrived across all three GPU vendors within about two months of each other at the end of 2022. Anything older than that generation cannot do it, and no driver update will change that — the encoder is a fixed-function block on the die, not software.

The correction worth making loudly, because it catches more people than anything else on this page: RTX 30-series cards can decode AV1 but cannot encode it. The 30-series spec sheet lists AV1 under video support, people read that as a green light, and then the encoder never appears in OBS. It is not a driver fault and there is no workaround. The same trap exists on the AMD side, where RX 6000 cards decode AV1 and do not encode it.

Within the RTX 40-series there is a second wrinkle that arrives as the immediate follow-up question. The 4060, 4060 Ti and 4070 ship a single NVENC chip; the 4070 Ti Super and above ship two. That has nothing to do with AV1 as such, but it decides whether you can comfortably encode a stream and a local recording at once — and Twitch's Enhanced Broadcasting asks you to produce several encodes simultaneously, which makes it very relevant here.

Software AV1 exists too. OBS ships SVT-AV1 and aom-av1, which encode on your CPU with no special hardware. Treat both as recording and VOD tools. At the fast presets needed to hit real time on a typical gaming PC you have given away most of the efficiency that made AV1 attractive, and at the presets where the efficiency survives you will drop frames rather than stream. If you want AV1 without a modern GPU, the honest answer is that you do not have it yet. For the difference between fixed-function hardware encoders and CPU encoding generally, our OBS multistream settings guide covers how to pick between them.

Will the Platform Accept It?

This is the gate that actually stops people, and it is the fastest-moving part of the subject. Encoding AV1 is settled hardware; accepting AV1 is a product decision each platform makes separately.

Before the platform-by-platform detail, the structural point that explains most failures: RTMP is the bottleneck, not the platform's willingness. Classic RTMP was specified long before AV1 existed and has no standard way to signal that the video inside it is AV1. The fix is Enhanced RTMP — the E-RTMP specification, which added FourCC codec signalling for AV1, HEVC and VP9 — or a different transport entirely, such as SRT, WHIP or WebRTC. If you are pushing plain RTMP to a plain endpoint, AV1 will not work regardless of what your GPU can do. That one paragraph resolves a large share of "why is my AV1 stream not working" searches.

Twitch gates AV1 behind Enhanced Broadcasting. In June 2026 Twitch widened the programme considerably: dual-format streaming went out to all streamers, and 1440p over HEVC became available to Partners and Affiliates at up to 9 Mbps at 1440p and 7.5 Mbps at 1080p. AV1 and 4K did not come with it — both remain restricted to the Enhanced Broadcasting beta community. If you are not in that beta, the AV1 option either will not appear for your Twitch target or the stream will be rejected at ingest. Enhanced Broadcasting also needs OBS 30 or later, and it works by having your PC produce several simultaneous encodes rather than one, so Twitch can build the quality ladder without transcoding. That is a real cost on your hardware, and it is the reason the dual-NVENC question above matters.

The history is worth a sentence, because it explains why the beta exists at all: for roughly a decade, non-Partners were capped at 6,000 kbps with no guarantee of transcodes for their viewers. Enhanced Broadcasting is Twitch's answer to that, and better codecs are one part of it.

YouTube Live is the permissive one. YouTube's own live encoder documentation lists H.264, HEVC and AV1 as accepted ingest codecs, with no beta programme attached. Its bitrate guidance quietly confirms the efficiency claim: for 1080p60 YouTube asks for 4–10 Mbps if you send AV1 or HEVC, against a recommended 12 Mbps for H.264. If you stream only to YouTube and own the right GPU, AV1 is genuinely usable today — not eventually, today.

Kick is the one the wider web gets wrong. Third-party articles routinely list Kick as accepting AV1 or HEVC; Kick's own help documentation says it supports x264 / H.264 encoding only, at up to 8,000 kbps and 60fps. Believe the platform. If Kick is one of your destinations, your codec decision is already made. For how the three compare more broadly, our Twitch, YouTube and Kick comparison covers the rest of the differences.

Can Your Viewers Decode It?

A stream nobody can play is not a better stream. Decode is the gate you have no influence over, and it is the one that decides whether AV1 is worth anything to your audience rather than to your uplink.

Desktop browsers are effectively solved. Chrome, Edge and Firefox will play AV1 on any reasonably modern machine, falling back to software decode where the GPU cannot help. Safari is hardware-dependent, and Apple's timeline is the one most often misreported: AV1 hardware decode arrived with M3 and A17 Pro, and hardware AV1 encode did not appear until the newest high-end M-series chips. A MacBook from 2023 can watch your AV1 stream comfortably and cannot produce one.

The weak spot is the living room and the pocket. Smart TVs and streaming sticks are patchy in a way that is genuinely hard to predict — two models from the same manufacturer and the same year can differ. Older phones will fall back to software decode, which on a phone means heat, battery drain and dropped frames rather than a clean failure. If a meaningful slice of your audience watches on a TV app or a three-year-old handset, that is a real consideration and not a rounding error.

There is a twist that undercuts the whole premise, and it deserves to be said plainly: platforms transcode. When a viewer's device cannot handle AV1, the platform re-encodes your stream to H.264 for them, which means your AV1 upload does not necessarily reach anyone as AV1. The honest conclusion is that today AV1 mostly improves your upload, not their download. That is still worth having — it is the difference between fitting inside a bitrate cap and not — but it is a smaller claim than most articles make.

What 40% More Efficient Actually Buys You

"40% more efficient" means nothing until it is a number in your OBS settings. Here is the same picture quality expressed both ways.

There are exactly two ways to spend that saving, and which one applies to you depends on what is currently limiting you.

Same bitrate, better picture. This is the win when the platform is your ceiling. At a 6,000 kbps cap, AV1 at 6,000 looks meaningfully better than H.264 at 6,000 — and the difference is not subtle on the content that has always broken H.264 at that rate: grass and foliage, smoke grenades, particle effects, snow, water, fast camera pans. If you have ever watched your own VOD turn to mush the moment you sprinted through a treeline, that is the artefact AV1 fixes.

Same picture, less upload. This is the win when your connection is the constraint, or when you are sending one encode to several destinations and your headroom is thin. For the specific number your platform and resolution want, our recommended bitrate for your platform and resolution is the faster answer than any table on this page.

Be realistic about where the gain lands. AV1 helps most on high-motion, high-detail, low-bitrate content — battle royale foliage, racing games, anything with confetti or weather. It helps least on a static talking-head layout that already looks clean at 4,000 kbps. If your stream is a webcam and a slide, the codec is not your bottleneck.

Turning AV1 On in OBS

The setting lives at Settings → Output → Output Mode: Advanced → Streaming → Video Encoder. You are looking for an entry named for your hardware — NVIDIA NVENC AV1, AMD HW AV1 or Intel QSV AV1. Exact wording shifts between OBS releases, but the vendor name and "AV1" are always both present.

If it is not in the dropdown, update your GPU driver before concluding the hardware cannot do it. A card that shipped with AV1 encode and an OBS build that supports it will still hide the option behind an old driver, and that is a far more common cause than genuine incompatibility.

Most of your existing settings carry over unchanged. Rate control stays on CBR — live streaming requires a constant bitrate regardless of codec. Keyframe interval stays at 2 seconds, because that is what the platforms segment on and AV1 does not change it. NVENC's AV1 encoder uses the same P1–P7 preset scale as its H.264 encoder, so whatever you were running there is a sensible starting point.

The AV1-specific notes are short. There is no profile choice to agonise over the way there is with H.264's main and high profiles. B-frames behave differently from the H.264 implementation and the default is correct for live. And on Twitch specifically, Enhanced Broadcasting has to be enabled in OBS before AV1 becomes selectable for a Twitch target at all — the encoder list alone is not the gate.

AV1 and Multistreaming: the Weakest-Link Problem

If you send one stream to several platforms, your codec choice is not really yours to make. It belongs to whichever destination is furthest behind.

StreamUps multistreams without re-encoding — we relay your original stream to every destination rather than decoding and recompressing it. That is a straightforward quality win, because nothing touches your video between your encoder and the platform, and it is why multistreaming costs you one upload rather than four. But it has a direct consequence here: whatever you encode is exactly what every destination receives.

So if you are going to Twitch, YouTube and Kick together, your codec has to satisfy all three. Kick documents H.264 only. That settles it — the answer is not "AV1 to the ones that take it, H.264 to the rest", because there is only one encode. It is H.264 to all of them. The least capable destination sets your codec, and that will stay true until AV1 ingest is universal.

Two practical consequences. If you stream to YouTube alone, none of this applies and AV1 is available to you now. And whatever you send out, your local recording is a separate encoder with a separate output — you can stream H.264 to everyone and record AV1 or HEVC for the archive at the same time. Our recording storage calculator will tell you how much disk an AV1 recording actually uses, and flags the editor-compatibility caveat that comes with it.

Should You Use AV1 Right Now?

Read this as a decision rather than a recommendation. AV1 is right for a specific and fairly narrow set of streamers today, and wrong for most.

The summary: AV1 is not a general upgrade yet, it is a situational one. If you are YouTube-only on modern hardware, take it — the bitrate saving is real and the platform already wants it. If you multistream, or your audience lives on TVs and phones, H.264 remains the correct default and there is no shame in that. The codec will win eventually; the ingest and decode ecosystem has not finished catching up, and pretending otherwise just gets your stream rejected.

AV1 Streaming FAQ

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