Does Discord Support AV1? How to Solve Discord not Decoding AV1?

"AV1 support in Discord would be really hyping, so please do this." – from Discord Community

The requests for Discord AV1 support are increasing. Discord can’t embed AV1 videos currently, but the support is available soon later this year based on Nvidia’s latest news. Before that, you can’t play AV1 videos on Discord, but download the AV1 encoded videos from Discord to play in VLC or other AV1 players. Now that Discord can’t decode AV1/AV01 codec, how to make AV1 videos playable on Discord?

Part 1. Does Discord Support AV1?

No. Discord does not support AV1 codec at present. But someone had tested that the version of chromium Discord built with (Chrome/91.0.4472.164 Electron/13.6.6) had AV1 support already, despite that Discord couldn't enable the AV1 video embedding.

No official response is here, but there is still hope to see Discord AV1 support soon later this year. When Nvidia announced the RTX 40 Series Ada GPUs on September 20th which features AV1 encoding support, it also announced several software will add AV1 support in collaboration with Nvidia and Discord is in the list.

"We’ve also worked with Discord to enable end-to-end livestreams with AV1. In an update releasing later this year, Discord will enable its users to use AV1 to dramatically improve screen sharing, be it for gameplay, school work, or hangouts with friends." – from Nvidia

As there are several days for Discord developers to add AV1 decoding ability to Discord, you need some help to play AV1 videos on Discord or AV1 videos downloaded from Discord.

See also: How to Use AV1 on OBS Studio 29.0 and Later

Part 2. How to Solve Discord not Decoding AV1 Issue?

This part focuses on converting AV1 videos for uploading to Discord or converting AV1 videos downloaded from Discord. The tool you need is Winxvideo AI which can convert AV1 videos to Discord-supported ones (MP4, WebM, and MOV encoded in H.264) and compress large-sized videos to bypass Discord file size limit. Also, you can convert Discord AV1 videos to any other format for PC, iPhone, Android, TV, etc. to play smoothly.

Step 1. Free download Winxvideo AI, install, and launch it on your computer.

Step 2. Choose Video Converter from the main interface and click on the "+ Video" button on the main UI to add the AV1 video needing transcoding.

Step 3. When the Output Profile window pops up, choose an output format. Here, we suggest you to choose "MP4 (h264+aac)" as the best output format for Discord.

Step 4. Optionally, you can click on the Settings icon to adjust the video codec, frame rate, aspect ratio, video resolution (e.g. 4K to 1080p), etc. to make the AV1 video smaller to upload to Discord.

Step 5. Once done, click the "Browse" button to choose a destination folder to save the converted file. Then, hit "RUN" button to start transcoding AV1 video to Discord.

Note: If your AV1 video is too large or high in resolution, you are advised to turn on the Hardware Acceleration option to speed up the conversion process.

Step 6. Once converted, you can upload AV1 videos to Discord and play AV1 videos on Discord without issues.