Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is world's first chip to use Samsung's APV codec

Qualcomm recently announced its newest high-end chips. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is its most advanced smartphone chip ever, and it will be used in the Galaxy S26 series next year. Besides exceptional performance, it is also the world's first chip to use Samsung's APV video codec that aims to compete with Apple's ProRes codec.

Advanced Professional Video (APV) is a new codec developed by Samsung in 2023. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the first smartphone chip to support APV on a hardware level. APV is a royalty-free video codec that enables cinematic-quality video capture on smartphones and post-production capabilities.

Additionally, it offers near lossless quality and is 10% more space-efficient than Apple’s ProRes video codec and 20% more efficient than HEVC.

APV supports intra-frame-only coding, multi-view videos, HDR10+, and up to 8K resolution and . It also supports high-quality chroma sub-sampling ranging from (4:0:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4, and 4:4:4:4) and bit depths from 10-bit to 16-bit.

The timing of this announcement seems perfect, as Google recently started supporting the APV codec, as it is included in Android 16. Moreover, Samsung is expected to use APV codec in the Galaxy S26 series early next year. It has been standardized through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

It is backed by Adobe, Android, ArcSoft, Blackmagic Design (DaVinci Resolve), Company 3, Dolby, and YouTube. So, we can expect an ecosystem to be created around the use of videos captured using the APV codec.