Video codec engines are whirring back into life, disturbed by recent HEVC Advance movements in Asia-Pacific. Netflix sent out disruptive ripples of its own late last week by adding support for AV1 on Android smartphones in a move that will see adoption soar for the royalty-free, Google-backed compression technology. Netflix has reported 20% compression efficiency gains over VP9 by replacing it with AV1, which you could criticize for underperforming, considering AV1 has promised as much as 30% efficiency increases over current generation codecs VP9 and HEVC (H.265). However, AV1 decoding is 30% more complex than VP9 or AVC. Only select Netflix titles are available to stream via the Data Saving feature that enables AV1 compression. Netflix is simply reacting to…