FANG representatives among the founding members of AOMedia (plus Tencent and Intel) provided a critical update on AV1 codec progress at this week’s virtual IBC Showcase – with questions about the when and where of hardware decoders taking precedence. Panelists generally agreed that 2022, perhaps 2023 to play it safe, is the realistic timeframe for getting commercial AV1 software decoders rolling out into the mainstream, even going as far to predict that hardware decoders will be readily available come 2025. That is an ambitious goal given the codec’s well-documented hardware struggles, with only Mediatek (smartphone SoC), Broadcom (set top), Realtek (set top), and Nvidia (GPU) currently supporting AV1 decode. A goal of the panel discussion was to alter AV1’s reputation…