Mishaal Rahman: Google confirms that Android is switching to VideoLAN's libdav1d decoder for AV1 video playback!
Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman@androiddev.social)
That's huge for VLC
As an average user... Should I be excited?
If you have an older or low to some midrange phone, then you might get better performance watching some videos.
It seems more concerning that YT is apparently forcing AV1 when there's no hardware decoder for it (if I'm reading that thread right). Seems like that will make people think their battery is starting to go — better software decoder or not.
AV1 hardware decoders are available in recent phones.
Only in some of the most recent and high-end. I think Apple just added one to the iphone within the last year. Qualcomm wasn't much quicker. There's a lot of perfectly good phones out there that don't have AV1 hardware decoders.