Meta’s Video Encoding Expert David Ronca (who will remind you about the Technical Emmy he won while spearheading Netflix’s encoding team), was at Mile High Video 2025 presenting VCAT (Video Codec Acid Test) – a mobile video decoder benchmarking tool. The social media company has set an ambitious goal of “AV1 for all” by 2028, identifying that 85% of all Android devices will be capable of running AV1-encoded streams. But with hardware support moving at a glacial pace, software decoding is the only way forward, and Meta is all-in. Ronca admits that industry expectations for hardware AV1 decoding were overly optimistic. Today, only 10% of Android devices (and only the newest generation of iPhones) ship with AV1 hardware decoders, and…