The Tensor G3 is the first smartphone SoC to support hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding. It supports AV1 encoding at up to 4K60. No application (including the Pixel Camera app) takes advantage of this, though, likely due to a lack of platform support.
@MishaalRahman It is exposed via FFmpeg, but the resulting bitstream lacks any metadata regardless of the specified container format so the files are unplayable.
@MishaalRahman I definitely tried to try it out, haha. I was doing visual quality testing across all of the hardware encoders present in Tensor G3 when I came upon the Google AV1 encoding block which is distinct from the Exynos blocks. The fact that it doesn't write any container metadata makes it appear impossible to use, though; I haven't found a way around that.
I know this technically isn't new information, since a leak from Kamila Wojciechowska back in June revealed the chipset supports AV1 encoding. However:
That was a leak, which hadn't been followed up on to confirm after the chipset's launch.
The leak said the chipset supported HW AV1 encoding @ 4K30. That was true at one point, but Google updated the encoder to target 4K60 prior to launch.
No other smartphone SoC supports AV1 encoding, not the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Dimensity 9300, or Exynos 2400. I wonder if/when other silicon vendors will adopt it. Most smartphones today still default to h.264 for encoding videos because of its wide compatibility.
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