GoKawiilNow that the AV2 specification is publicly available after five years of hard work, AOMedia members are already demonstrating it in real-world playback environments. At CES 2026, AOMedia members Google, and VideoLAN participated in AV2 decoding demonstrations, with support from THX. They showed real-time AV2 playback on laptops using current reference implementations, spanning both native applications and browser-based streaming pipelines.
Together, these efforts showed that AV2 decoding can operate end-to-end in realistic playback scenarios and on widely available laptop-class systems.
Native application decoding with VLC
VideoLAN demonstrated real-time AV2 decoding using VLC 4 running on a macOS laptop. The playback occurred in a native desktop media player rather than in a web browser. The same approach also ran on other platforms, reflecting VLC’s cross-platform design.
The demonstration used a VLC plugin integrating the AVM reference decoder. The plugin was built against the latest AV2 development branch and executed on an ARM-based macOS system.
This work represents the first known demonstration of AV2 decoding in a native desktop media player on laptops. It showed that AV2 decoding can be integrated into an existing media player architecture and run in real time on standard consumer hardware.
Web-based decoding and streaming pipeline
A second demonstration showed AV2 decoding in a browser-based streaming environment. Google demonstrated AV2 playback using Chrome to play AV2 videos streamed from YouTube to a gaming laptop, with real time playback at 1080p and 24 frames per second.
For this demonstration, a set of videos was encoded using a pre-release AV2 bitstream generated with the libavm reference encoder. The content was delivered via an existing streaming platform and played back using a custom browser build that incorporated the libavm reference decoder.
This demonstration exercised a complete encode-to-decode pipeline and showed that AV2 can function within a browser-based playback environment on consumer laptop hardware.
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