YouTube adds AV1 codec, also available in 4K Video Downloader

I noticed an article that says that YouTube has added support for the AV1 codec. Until recently, YouTube videos were usually either MP4 or VP9. I've been following the progress of the AV1 codec for the past few years, starting back when they still called it VP10. They finalized the codec this year but I couldn't figure out when it would go into mainstream use. Here is the article I found: YouTube testing AV1 codec on Chrome, Firefox for more efficient streaming

I installed Chrome 70 beta and tried the playlist. Sure enough, when I right-clicked and chose "Stats for nerds", it said the video was in AV1 format. I tried the URL in 4K Video Downloader and it showed a bunch of unknown entries in the MP4 category.

The article mentioned AV1 only being available up to 480p, so I wondered why there were so many options and why they went up to 40.3 MiB. I downloaded the largest one and tried to play it. MPC-HC didn't recognize the codec but thankfully I just had to update it. Once I did, I was able to play the video.

The file turned out to be 1080p, so YouTube must have encoded higher resolutions after the article was written. MPC-HC was able to play it at the full 29.97 fps on an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU.

It also played surprisingly well in the browser at 1080p.

The only issue I noticed is that the downloaded file had no sound.