Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, and others making up the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) have today announced the public draft release of the AV1 royalty-free video format!

The AV1 v1.0 specification is now public. With broad industry support, AV1 is expected to take on H.265 for competing on HD and 4K UHD video streaming while being royalty-free and reportedly using less data. Member companies of AOMedia have reported an average of 30 percent greater compression over competing codecs.

Today's release includes the bitstream specification, an experimental software decoder and encoder, reference streams, and the binding specifications.

The code is hosted via Google. The specification and more are available from AOMedia.org. There is also the experimental support in the recent GStreamer 1.14 release.

Update: Developers working on AV1 have confirmed that it's not AV1 1.0.0 final that's been released but rather a draft candidate, but miscommunicated by their PR firm.