At CES 2026, the developers of the VideoLAN project demonstrated a preliminary build of VLC 4, which features support for the AV2 video encoding format. VLC demonstrated playback of AV2 video at 1080p quality on a standard laptop without hardware acceleration for video decoding. The release date for VLC 4.0 has not yet been announced, but testing the upcoming release is possible by rebuilding the master branch from the Git repository.
The AV2 codec is royalty-free and is being developed by the Open Media Alliance (AOMedia) as a successor to the AV1 format. AV2 features include: optimization for streaming; improved prediction of interframe changes; significant improvement in compression performance compared to AV1; expanded support for virtual and augmented reality; support for a wider range of visual qualities; the ability to simultaneously deliver multiple videos within a single video stream with support for their separate display on the screen; additional filters for noise suppression, reduction of compression artifacts, and preservation of detail.
Source: opennet.ru
