Future Application Profiles for the AV1 Standard

This article provides an overview of how the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is shaping the long-term maintenance of the AV1 video codec through new and refined application profiles. As AV1 solidifies its role across the web, future maintenance relies on tailoring profiles to emerging paradigms—including ultra-low-latency communications, extended reality (XR), professional production, and edge computing—without compromising broad cross-platform interoperability.

Current Baseline: The Existing AV1 Profiles

The initial AV1 specification established three core profiles:

• Main Profile: Supports 8-bit and 10-bit color depths with 4:0:0 (monochrome) and 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, serving as the standard for general consumer web streaming and video-on-demand (VOD).
• High Profile: Extends capabilities to 4:4:4 chroma subsampling for 8-bit and 10-bit video, targeting content like desktop screen sharing and high-fidelity graphics.
• Professional Profile: Adds support for 12-bit color depth across all subsampling formats (4:0:0, 4:2:0, 4:2:2, and 4:4:4), intended for professional post-production and mastering workflows.

While these baseline profiles cover conventional broadcast and web delivery, ongoing standard maintenance is shifting toward specialized application-specific profiles designed to meet distinct performance, latency, and hardware constraints.

Real-Time Communication (RTC) Profiles

Real-time video calling, cloud gaming, and interactive broadcasting require strict sub-second latency guarantees. Future RTC-focused profiles target:

• Constrained Toolsets: Disabling computationally expensive tools (such as complex in-loop filtering and multi-frame referencing) to reduce encoding and decoding latency.
• Fine-Grained Scalability: Standardizing Scalable Video Coding (SVC) modes natively within the profile to handle dynamic network bandwidth fluctuations seamlessly.
• Screen Content Coding Optimization: Enhancing palette mode and intra-block copy mechanisms specifically for collaborative work environments and remote desktop applications.

Professional Editing and Archival Profiles

To compete with mezzanine and editing formats such as Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHR, future maintenance considerations include dedicated intermediate profiles:

• Intra-Only Modes: Removing inter-frame temporal dependencies to allow zero-latency frame scrubbing and rapid random access during non-linear editing.
• Extended Dynamic Range: Enhancing support for 12-bit and 14-bit workflows, lossless coding modes, and uncompressed alpha channels to facilitate compositing and visual effects rendering.

Immersive and Extended Reality (XR) Profiles

Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and volumetric video present unique bandwidth and processing challenges due to extreme resolutions (8K+ per eye) and high frame rates (90 Hz to 120 Hz). Envisioned XR profiles focus on:

• Optimized Tiling: Enhancing independent tile decoding to enable viewport-dependent streaming, where only the sector of the 360-degree sphere that the user is actively viewing is decoded at maximum resolution.
• Multi-View and Depth Maps: Integrating synchronized stereoscopic views and depth-map metadata within a single elementary stream to reduce rendering overhead on head-mounted displays.

Low-Power and Edge-Constrained Profiles

As internet-of-things (IoT) devices, smart surveillance cameras, and automotive systems adopt AV1, high computational complexity becomes a limiting factor. An ultra-lightweight profile aims to:

• Limit Decoding Hardware Footprint: Restricting syntax elements to reduce silicon gate count and power draw in battery-powered or resource-constrained embedded systems.
• Fixed Transform and Motion Toolsets: Standardizing a simplified subset of transform blocks and motion vector predictions to facilitate cost-effective ASIC implementations.

By systematically introducing these focused application profiles, AOMedia ensures that the AV1 standard remains computationally practical, power-efficient, and adaptable to modern video architectures throughout its operational lifecycle.