AV01 Codec VLC Playback Tips – Play AV1 Videos Easily

AV01 or AV1 is an open video coding format primarily designed for video streaming over the internet. It was developed by Alliance for Open Media to surpass VP9. Due to its better compression technology and royalty-free nature, AV1 is currently used by mainstream browsers and many streaming platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Vimeo, and so forth. Some video players also support AV1 videos.

Yes, VLC does support AV1 codec. As a part of Alliance for Open Media, VLC AV1 codec support has been added since version 3.0.0. And VLC continued to improve the AV1 playback ability thereafter. Generally, there should be no problem playing AV01 videos in VLC. However, some people received an error message Codec not supported: VLC could not decode the format "av01" (AOMedia's AV1 Video) when trying to play some AV1-encoded files. According to the VLC support team, this error occurs because AV1 is an unfinished project released too early and they don’t want to fix the issue as of now. Despite all this, you can still try the following methods to fix the VLC AV1 playback issue.

Solution 1. Update VLC to the Latest Version

VLC is still getting updated with old bugs fixed. Updating your VLC to the latest version will solve most of the issues you currently have. Just uninstall the old VLC from your system and re-install the latest version from https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html. Then play AV1 in VLC and see if it works.

Solution 2. Use dav1d with VLC

dav1d is an open-source AV1 decoder developed by the VideoLAN and FFmpeg groups aiming to provide faster and better AV1 decoding performance. You can compile this patch into VLC to decode your AV1 files. For more help about this AV1 codec for VLC, you can refer to https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d.

Solution 3. Convert AV1 to Popular Format

Compared with AV1, popular formats like H264, MPEG-4, and HEVC are mature codecs well-supported by VLC. Converting AV1 to one of these formats is a foolproof solution to fix the AV01 codec VLC error. And you can use a simple and free video converter such as Free HD Video Converter Factory to handle the conversion easily. Without further ado, let me show you how to use this AV1 converter to convert AV1 to MP4 (encode with H264) for smooth playback in VLC.

Step 1. Open Free HD Video Converter Factory. [Quick Download Quick Download]

Step 2. Select the “Converter” module and add the unsupported AV1 file to the program.

Tips. You can click the Play button on the video thumbnail to play the AV1 video at once.

Step 3. Go to the right side of the program and open the output format page. Next, in the “Video” category, choose “MP4” as the output format.

Step 4. Open “Parameter settings” below and change the video encoder to “H264.”

Step 5. Finally, click “Run” to start the conversion at once. Then, try playing the converted file with VLC and see if the problem goes away.

Hot Search: AV1 Codec Download | Enable YouTube AV1 Settings | AV1 vs HEVC

While VLC supports AV01 codec natively, it sometimes fails to play AV1 videos. If you encountered this problem, try the above solutions to fix the VLC AV1 codec error. I hope you’ll find this article helpful. Thanks for reading. Have a nice day!