What Drives Streaming Codec Choices at Meta and Norsk
As debates over codec choices in the streaming world range from H.264 to AV1 and HEVC and beyond, what drives decision-making when it comes to codec choices for solution and service providers helping creators and customers get video online for live and VOD consumption?
According to Meta’s Hassene Tmar and Norsk’s Steve Strong, key factors include software and hardware support and compatibility, bitrate reductions, latency constraints, and more, as the two explain in this discussion with Alchemy Creations’ Andy Beach from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
Join conference chair Andy Beach and other streaming media experts in person Oct. 6–8 in Santa Monica, CA, for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media 2025
Give the People What They Want
Media and AI strategist Andy Beach opens the conversation by asking Norsk CTO Steve Strong about the codecs Norsk considers for live streaming and what drives those choices. He also wonders if there are differences in how Norsk thinks about architectures when looking at codecs such as AV1, HEVC, and H.264.
Strong notes that H.264 remains Norsk customers’ predominant codec for live streaming. “Much as, as a techie, I’d love to have a good reason to throw VVC and some of the new fancy AI codecs and stuff like that into Norsk, the reality is, that’s not what people want,” Strong says. “Once you get into the distribution at scale, they want [the] common denominator. They want it to play on everyone’s playback device. So H.264 is by far and away the predominant codec.”
Norsk offers flexibility in its codec choices, balancing between software and hardware solutions based on customer needs because each one has different priorities when it comes to factors such as cost, quality, and latency. “So we range from software through to a number of hardware codecs: the standard x264, x265, NVIDIA, and NETINT, IMD, et cetera,” he explains.
Keep the Facebook Moms Happy
Beach then asks Meta Technical Program Manager Hassene Tmar to discuss Meta’s approach for both live and VOD, which he imagines predominantly focuses on AV1—although, like Norsk, Meta is “a multi-codec shop.” He then asks, “[W]hat drives some of the choices around how you support these?”
Tmar says Meta currently supports a mix of AV1, VP9, and AVC. He emphasizes the widespread adoption of AV1, which has surpassed the 50% bar for most of Meta’s VOD delivery. “And AV1 came in initially as a quality-boosting codec. It allowed us to increase the quality, especially on the Reels product. Then later on, we veered into tuning towards egress efficiency or bit rate reduction,” Tmar explains. AV1 is important for users who have limited bandwidth—with very little bandwidth, they can’t even see video, he adds. It could make the difference between having video and not having video.
Meta employs a mix of hardware and software implementations to address latency constraints, although, Tmar says, “even in VOD, there are latency constraints in there. So if I’m uploading my video to … my Facebook feed, I need to see it. I need to see it right away. My mom needs to see it right away. And so that kind of latency is what we care about.”
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