H.264 vs H.265 (HEVC) vs VP9 vs AV1: Which Video Codec Should You Choose?

H.264, standardised in 2003, is the codec almost every device made in the last fifteen years can decode in hardware: phones, laptops, smart TVs, game consoles, car head units and every major browser. If you need a file that simply plays everywhere, H.264 video with AAC audio in an MP4 container is still the safest choice.

Its weakness is efficiency. At the same visual quality, H.264 needs noticeably more bitrate than the newer codecs, which matters for 4K and for long recordings. It is also covered by patents that are licensed through a patent pool, although that rarely affects someone converting their own files.

H.265 was published in 2013 as the successor to H.264. It was designed to deliver similar quality at roughly half the bitrate; in practice the savings depend on the encoder and the content, but a clear reduction is typical, especially at high resolutions. iPhones record in HEVC by default when the camera is set to High Efficiency, and many 4K cameras and drones use it too.

Support is the catch. Apple devices handle HEVC natively. On Windows, playback usually depends on an HEVC extension from the Microsoft Store or on hardware support exposed by the graphics driver. Chrome and Edge can play HEVC when the computer has a hardware decoder, and Firefox support is more recent and also hardware-dependent. Older TVs and many web players will refuse it. If you have HEVC footage that will not open somewhere, our guide on converting iPhone HEVC videos for Windows walks through the fix.

VP9 is Google's royalty-free codec, finalised in 2013 and used heavily by YouTube. Its compression efficiency is in the same league as HEVC. It is normally stored in WebM or MKV files and plays in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, with support in recent Safari versions as well.

Outside the browser, VP9 support is less consistent: many TVs and phones can decode it, but video editors and older hardware sometimes cannot. VP9 makes the most sense for files that will be played on the web, especially in a WebM container.

AV1 was released in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon and Mozilla. It is royalty-free and generally the most efficient of the four, which is why large streaming services use it where devices support it.

Two things hold it back for everyday use. First, hardware decoding only arrived in fairly recent chips, so older phones and laptops fall back to software decoding, which drains battery and can stutter at high resolutions. Second, encoding AV1 without a hardware encoder is slow. Our tools can read AV1 files where your browser can decode them, but they do not currently offer AV1 as an output codec.

Use this as a rule of thumb rather than a benchmark; real results depend on the encoder, its settings and the footage.

• Compatibility: H.264 is the widest, then VP9 and HEVC (each strong on different platforms), then AV1.
• Compression at the same quality: AV1 is usually best, HEVC and VP9 are close to each other, H.264 needs the most bitrate.
• Encoding speed without special hardware: H.264 is fastest, AV1 is by far the slowest.
• Licensing: VP9 and AV1 are royalty-free; H.264 and HEVC are licensed through patent pools.
• Typical containers: H.264 and HEVC in MP4 or MOV, VP9 in WebM or MKV, AV1 in MP4, WebM or MKV.

Start from the destination, not from the codec with the best reputation.

• Sharing with other people, uploading to a website or playing on an unknown device: H.264 in MP4.
• Archiving your own 4K footage or saving space on Apple devices: H.265 in MP4 or MOV.
• Embedding video on a web page: VP9 in WebM, ideally with an H.264 MP4 fallback for older browsers.
• Streaming at very large scale to modern devices: AV1, usually alongside an H.264 fallback.

Changing the codec always means re-encoding: the video is decoded to frames and compressed again with the new codec. Every lossy re-encode loses a little detail, so convert from the best copy you have and do not repeat the process on already-converted files.

In the Video Converter, pick an output format and the codec list updates to what that container can hold. MP4 offers H.264, H.265 and VP9; MOV offers H.264 and H.265; WebM offers VP9 and VP8; MKV offers H.264, VP8 and VP9. Whether H.265 encoding is available also depends on your browser and hardware, because the encoding happens on your own device. For the most common case, turning a WebM or MKV into a universally playable file, the WebM to MP4 and MKV to MP4 pages have the output format preselected.