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Apple has joined an organisation that hopes to end the dominance of the HEVC video codec. 

The Alliance For Open Media, which already has Google, Cisco, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Mozilla among its members, has just convinced Apple to join, to help the push to establish the "impressive on paper" AV1 codec.

The AV1 codec promises to be the most efficient video codec yet, with claims of it being more than 25% more efficient than HEVC.

The need to replace HEVC exists due to the codec's royalty framework, which makes the use of the codec costly and raises legal issues when used within open source projects.

Despite this, HEVC enjoys widespread industry support, and is currently used in most 4K applications, from Netflix to Ultra HD Blu-ray. The level of hardware support that HEVC enjoys, from 4KTVs to game consoles, will have to be matched by AV1 before it can supplant HEVC's dominance, and it is believed that Apple's support will be key to allow this to happen.

Support for AV1 has been gaining momentum recently, and just last month, Mozilla released a beta version of its Firefox browser that included AV1 support.

[via 4K.com]