AV1 video codec finalised

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Indeed.

 

Personally, if this does see mass adoption? Sweet! Kickass! Can't wait to use it!

 

Until then? Let's not overhype something that has yet to see any hardware adoption.

 

Plus, many people don't upgrade their CPU's or GPU's for a long time. Nor would they need to upgrade something like a streaming media box for a long time. Same with TV's. When I buy a TV, I want it to last 10+ years.

Pretty much the only reasonable argument is that mobile will see fairly quick adoption because people do tend to replace their phones somewhat quickly.

In what way is it overhyped?

The two benefits of AV1 are these two:

1) Better compression ratio. This has already been tested and it developers what it set out to do. It won't go backwards so we can only assume it will be better than it already is.

2) Be royalty free and have a decent licensing agreement. It has that too.

 

Phones will adopt it quickly since they are replaced so often.

STBs can be replaced cheaply and easily.

Desktops and laptops will be able to place it in software or hybrid decoders just fine. Not optimal and it won't be able to handle let's say 4K in all scenarios, but 720p and 1080p should be fine on anything fairly recent (which at the point of mass adoption will probably be "anything made in the last 8 years").

The only area I see struggling with adoption would be TVs, and even then it would be specifically smart TVs using their built in apps, but HEVC had the same issue and that didn't seem to slow it down.

 

By the way, AOMedia has updated their website to show a grid of icons, most likely a small sample of the applications which are working on integrating support for AV1 right now, or will start working on it soon.

 

[The Benjamins]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

How did you calculate that? Please remember that I am doing 60 FPS with that 25% CPU usage. She is doing 24 FPS with 70% CPU usage.

Even if we boost her FPS by 54% (which is the difference between her CPU and mine in terms of performance), we still have a massive gap of 37 FPS at 70% usage, vs 60 FPS at 25% usage.

 

Even if her CPU was at a stable 25% CPU usage it would still not line up with the expected performance.

 

oh I missed that, I think HVEC also has the same encoder settings like 264 (super fast, fast, med,...)

[LAwLz]

5 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

oh I missed that, I think HVEC also has the same encoder settings like 264 (super fast, fast, med,...)

Small correction, x265 has similar encoding preset names as x264.

But yeah, it is very possible that her file is more demanding than mine.

 

 

 

Also, for anyone interested in why HEVC is such as mess I highly recommend this blog post written by Leonardo Chiariglione, who is the founder and chairman of the MPEG group. HEVC was developed by MPEG together with ITU, so this it the person behind HEVC speaking.

 

Here are some quotes from it:

Quote

In 2013 MPEG approved the HEVC standard which provides the same quality as AVC at half the bitrate. The licensing situation is depicted by the picture below (courtesy of Jonathan Samuelsson of Divideon): there are 3 patent pools, one of which has not published their licence and a significant number of patent holders that have not joined any pool (and not published their licences either).

I saw the threat coming and one year ago I tried to bring the matter to the attention of the higher layers in ISO. My attempts were thwarted by a handful of NPEs.

 

Alliance for Open Media (AOM) has occupied the void created by MPEG’s outdated video compression standard (AVC), absence of competitive Options 1 standards (IVC) and unusable modern standard (HEVC). AOM’s AV1 codec, due to be released soon, is claimed to perform better than HEVC and will be offered royalty free.

 

At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke, all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in smoke and AOM’s royalty free model will spread to other business segments as well.

 

I also have some comments to make on the blog post.

He proposes a new model where MPEG releases future codecs in two flavors, one free to use and one higher performing version available under FRAND terms with clear patent pools. This is what kind of what Divideon is trying to do with xvc. It's free for personal use and has a clear licensing structure for commercial use (no free option for commercial use though).

(Personal note: I don't think xvc will get any widespread adoption. AV1 will crush it in terms of support, and there is a risk that other companies will find that it infringes on their patents).

 

The other comment I want to make is on his dooms day prediction that companies will stop developing new codecs if AV1 is successful. I don't believe that. Not only does a lack of development open up that risk of someone like MPEG creating a better codec and take over the market again, but it also doesn't make much sense because you will always have people like Xiph trying to improve things. That's the good thing about non-profit organizations. They can spend a bunch of money developing things like Daala (video codec that AV1 took a lot of features from) without having to worry about return on investment.

 

Companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix are also greatly incentivized to reduce the processing and bandwidth requirements even further. Shaving off even 5% of bandwidth requirements makes a massive difference for them, and can easily outweigh the development cost in the long run.

[Calderone]

It's actually pretty good. I can feel the next generation coming, we only need some cool new hardware to use with the AV1 . That's always the problem, new hardware.