VP9, HEVC and AV1

(UPDATE) Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Amazon and Netflix are now onboard for AV1 distribution.

Play a YouTube video in chrome. Now right click (rrr control click) on the window and go down to ‘Stats for nerds’

Under ‘codecs’ you’ll notice vp9 (315) and opus (251).

VP9 is the video compression codec. VP9 is royalty free versus its competitor HEVC/H.265.

Opus is the audio compression codec. Opus is also royalty free and it’s competitor is AAC.

HEVC is developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding or JCT-VC. Which is a collaboration between the ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG.

The ISO/IEC group refers to it as MPEG-H Part 2. The ITU-T refers to it as H.265

Though it's very easy to say you'd like to back the open source option, such little companies you may have heard of like Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix have chosen to back HEVC. Whether you enjoy these companies or not, they are the ones distributing most of the content on the internet that use this codec. The good news is unless you are a software development company, you will not be paying any AAC or HEVC royalties yourself.