Does Discord Support AV1? How to Enable Discord AV1 Settings?

Does Discord support AV1? Yes! Discord has rolled out AV1 streaming support for GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs this year. Read the following article to learn how to enable and utilize the Discord AV1 video codec on a Windows desktop.

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In computers, encoding is the process of converting data into a specialized format for efficient transmission or storage. Discord is the first major platform to use the AV1 encoding method for streaming. In contrast to the mostly H.264 video codec in Discord, AV1 delivers higher encoding efficiency for HD/UHD videos, especially 4K or even 8K. It presents up to 100% higher compression efficiency than H.264 for a 4K 60fps video file. Therefore, you can boost Discord’s streaming quality by enabling the AV1 codec. Where to find and how to enable the AV1 Discord setting? Before that, let’s see the hardware requirements for Discord AV1 encoding support:

According to Discord Support and NVidia GeForce officials,
1, streamers equipped with GeForce RTX 4080/4090 GPUs can take advantage of this new feature and send videos in AV1 format.
2, virtually all desktop viewers can watch AV1 streams without RTX 40 series GPU (either supported by hardware decode on GPUs and CPUs from 2020 and beyond or a software decoder compatible with most modern CPUs).

Note: Currently, sending AV1 video is only supported via the Windows desktop Discord app.

Note: To send a video in AV1 format, all viewers on the same voice call must enable AV1 codec. Meanwhile, Discord will use your GPU for video processing, which may slow down your computer.

Now, you can Go Live to share your screen or upload an AV1 file to Discord. With the encoding efficiency of AV1, you are able to stream flawless 1080p quality and even increase the resolution to 1440p or even 4K 60FPS content.

Please note Discord has a file size limit for video sharing of 8MB (or 50MB in Nitro Basic). Here are practical methods for you to bypass the upload limitation:
→ How to Bypass Discord File Size Limit on Windows?
→ How to Compress Videos for Discord? (Windows Solution)
→ How to Send Long/Large Videos on Discord?

As mentioned above, sending AV1 video is only supported via Windows desktop with NVidia RTX 40 series GPU, and all viewers on the same voice call must enable AV1 codec. If you are watching from a device that doesn’t support AV1, such as a mobile phone, Discord will automatically transcode the stream to a supported form. However, what should you do if you want to share an AV1 video but the hardware requirements aren’t met? The best solution is to transcode AV1 to H.264, which can be utilized and seen by every Discord user.

Below shows you how to do the video transcoding. Please free download the powerful video transcoder on your PC to get started.

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After converting videos to H.264, you can share them on Discord without device restrictions.

That’s all about the Discord AV1 video codec. Simply put, you can send AV1 files via a Windows desktop with RTX 40 series GPU or convert AV1 to H.264 MP4/WebM/MOV format for hassle-free sharing. Anyway, hope you find this article helpful. Thanks for reading!