The Future of Video Codecs is Saved! - Apple Joins AOMedia

LAwLz · January 7, 2018

Not much to say other than what's in the title.

Apple has decided to join the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). What this means is that all major players have now banded together and we will finally get one truly free and open, universal video format.

For those who don't know what AOMedia is, it's a collaboration between several big technology companies to develop a free and open video codec called AV1. The goal is to have it standardized as NetVC, which is a project by the IEEE to have a widely used video codec for Internet usage.

When Apple adopted HEIF/HEVC for their new image capturing format I was worried that we would end up in a situation where almost the entire industry would use AV1, but Apple would use HEVC and whatever the successor to HEVC will be called, and that would result in inefficiencies and compatibility issues. With this announcement all my worries are put to rest.

We will get one video format which will be used on all platforms.

The biggest problem with HEVC is that the licensing agreements are very complicated and also costs a lot of money which is why AOMedia was formed.

The goals of AV1 are:

40-50% higher efficiency than HEVC - The last time I heard, they had at least a 25-35% efficiency lead over HEVC. However, the speed is right now quite abysmal (between 4 and 10 times slower than HEVC), but that's because they have basically not spent any time optimizing the encoder. They are already aware of many optimizations they could implement.
Free to use (both monetary and licensing wise) - The license is very good. If anyone in the alliance sues anyone, for any reason, using a patent in the patent pool for an AOMedia format, then that company automatically revokes their right to use any of the other patents. Basically, if you try to kick on someone for using AV1, you can get sued by 20+ companies.
High performance in hardware - As you can see below, all major chipmakers are in the alliance. Every single feature added, changed or removed is carefully being looked over and changed with input from several hardware makers in order to maximize efficiency.
Fast encode and decoding for use in live video.
Support in both WebRTC as well as WebM (coupled with Opus for audio).
Support for all the modern video features like high resolution, wide color gamut, high frame rate, high bit depth (10 and 12 bits) and so on.
Support for both lossy and lossless encoding.

Companies currently in the alliance (a few lesser known left out):

Google
Microsoft
Apple
Mozilla/Xiph
Cisco
Facebook
Ateme
VideoLAN
Intel
AMD
Nvidia
ARM
Broadcom
IBM
Adobe
Amazon
Netflix
BBC
Hulu

Zodiark1593 · January 7, 2018

Only reason I despise this news is the fact that I'll need all new hardware to use it effectively on both desktop and my mobile hardware. Format shifts are a friggin expensive PITA. I just barely got HEVC on everything that matters.