YouTube and Netflix Announce Availability of Reference AV1 Decoder for Xbox One Platform

YouTube and Netflix have announced the availability of a reference AV1 software decoder for Xbox One game consoles. This GPU-accelerated decoder supports AV1 decoding up to 2K 30fps on all Xbox One consoles.

The decoder, available here, is based off of the libaom AV1 reference decoder. To achieve maximum performance on the Xbox One platform, all its components aside from the entropy decoder are executed on the GPU and rewritten using DirectX 12 compute shaders. The decoder also contains GPU-based implementations of algorithms that are difficult to parallelize, such as loop filtering and intra prediction. Both CPU and GPU decoding paths are pipelined to work simultaneously in order to further improve decoding speed.

YouTube and Netflix are excited about the growth opportunities this reference decoder may bring in the adoption of AV1 by the industry.