One of the best media players you can buy is the Apple TV 4K. Presented in 2021, this device has the capacity to convert any traditional television into a Smart TV. Or if you have a model that is not compatible with certain apps, this Apple player allows you to install everything you can think of since it has a really wide catalog of applications.
And it is that, you may like the company with the bitten apple more or less, but beyond the powerful NVIDIA Shield TV, there is no rival capable of standing up to this powerful multimedia player. The best of all? That soon it will be more complete than ever.
All thanks to an update that Apple is working on, as you can see on this support page, to provide this multimedia player with support to play content in 8K. All thanks to the AV1 codec.
What is the AV1 codec and how will it improve Apple TV 4K?
In case you don’t know the AV1 codec, say that it is a video standard that will come to replace the VP9 and HEVC formats currently used. Especially the last one we mentioned, which is in charge of offering 4K content.
The problem with HEVC is that it consumes a lot of data to play 4K content online, while AV1 offers much better performance. It should be noted that Google, Microsoft and Netflix are already adopting this standard to improve playback on their services.
And, from what we have been able to know, the Apple TV 4K will be the next model to have support for this video standard. Taking into account that it manages to improve andl Yield by 40% compared to HEVCit is clear that AV1 is the future.
Thanks to this, when you try to play content in 4K, the bandwidth consumption will be much lower, but without losing an iota of image quality. The best of all? That Apple TV 4K will also be able to play 8K content thanks to the arrival of this codec.
It’s still too early to tell when Apple TV 4K will be updated to support this video codec, but they’ll probably announce its arrival in September. And remember that it is very likely that Apple will also present a new improved media player and that it would be the evolution of the current model. We do not know if it will be called Apple TV 4K or Apple TV 8K, but it will have a more powerful processor to further improve the performance of a product that has very few rivals.
