In my unpopular opinion, the first steps that we need to bring AV1 to the web is to stop using HLS and start using DASH
It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
301–310 of 327 posts
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from the size issue, GIF only support 256 colors per frame, so photos and real-life videos almost always have visible dithering artifacts. It's a terribly shitty format, but remains popular because it has universal support and so works with no fuss. We need to get the same amount of support for a better format.
Unless you're willing to backport that support to 10+ year old browsers, it will never happen. You need UNIVERSAL support. Edge cases, corner cases, and plain old "bad ideas" included. This is what the incumbent has going for it.
Why? Getting the major browsers on board going forward has always worked fine before. Most of them update automatically now, anyway.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#303Terry Davis was extremely talented. He also had his demons. I dunno if there was anything he could do about them. But let's not pretend he didn't have them. He said some terrible stuff: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Terry_Davis .
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19875516 and marked it off-topic.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#304At this point, killing GIF is a UX problem, not a format problem. I've talked about this before [0], but the big problem for me is that video is just difficult as hell. Compared to a GIF, it is just that much harder to save a video on a phone, and then upload it the same way as an image. Try to save a "GIF" from Twitter or from GIPHY - it's a /huge/ pain. Whatever the GIF killer is will need to pass the right click t…
The UX for saving and sharing videos is the same as for images, including right click to save. You and I don't get that UX, though, because Twitter, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and most websites write code to fight off-site sharing and deploy it on their videos but not their images. They skip images presumably because it's easier to bypass there and because everybody knows you're user-hostile when you break image UX,…
> including right click to save
This only works for video tags that load a single webm/mp4 file. If it's using more complex chunked/streaming/mediasource delivery mode then you can't save the whole video because it's driven by javascript that might only keep a tiny slice of it loaded at any given time and not a single downloadable file. It also auto-negotiate quality and serve you a reduced version, which is probably not what you would want if you're downloading it.
Then you need browser addons or tools like youtube-dl to get the whole thing.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video isn't superior for sharable, loopable images. Try downloading a video from a popular social network. Can you easily do it without inspecting the source? If it's a two second clip, does it loop on your system? Or does the video player exit / end the stream? This is absolutely a problem that GIF doesn't have. > You don't need a proprietary player to loop a video > You can save any video file just like a gif. Exce…
> Try downloading a video from a popular social network. That's the site's decision. You also cannot easily download images from Twitter if there are more than one in a tweet for example. On Instagram it is blocked all in all.
> That's the site's decision.
No it isn't. UA means user agent, not corporate agent. If the user decides to persist something that is loaded on his machine then it is his choice to make.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#306Terry Davis was extremely talented. He also had his demons. I dunno if there was anything he could do about them. But let's not pretend he didn't have them. He said some terrible stuff: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Terry_Davis .
I'm sorry, but your comment has no place here. I was discussing a dead soul with reverence and respect. That is not the time to jump in with "oh but actually he was terrible". That is incredibly rude and poor taste and disrespectful to the dead. Terry Davis suffered greatly from mental illness, specifically schizophrenia. He suffered from confusion. It's quite disgusting that you try to cite some of the ridiculous th…
Please don't attack another user like you did here and below, regardless of how wrong or bad a comment is. The site guidelines ask us all to Be kind. That's always important, but surely even more so when you're arguing for treating someone better.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe this would incentive Apple into supporting these formats. For vp9, it seems to me there isn't any good excuse for not supporting it.
> For vp9, it seems to me there isn't any good excuse for not supporting it. Exporting video formats is expensive: there's a lot of optimization work to have a high-quality battery-friendly implementation, decode hardware has to be licensed & updated, and they have to do security hardening and support every time they add a new format. If they're already working on AV1, why double the cost to add support for an older…
It’s not like Apple can’t bear this cost. VP9 has existed since 2012, Android has supported the format since version 4.4 released in 2013. AV1 was then unheard of. Surely they weren’t working on it then.
VP9 is still interesting today since there are many devices out there that decode it and will never decode AV1 with hardware.
I think the reason is not technical. Apple has patents for MPEG formats, I think they wanted to push these formats instead. By not supporting VP8/VP9, they force(d) everyone to support their formats.
Now, if I want to make a video call with someone with an Apple device, I'll probably need, if I live in a place where software patents apply, to pay a license to decode/encode an MPEG format where the royalty-free VP9 would have done the job. Worse, I probably indirectly pay these fees (anyway) when I buy devices with support for MPEG formats, even if I live at some place were software patents don't apply.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For vp9, it seems to me there isn't any good excuse for not supporting it. Exporting video formats is expensive: there's a lot of optimization work to have a high-quality battery-friendly implementation, decode hardware has to be licensed & updated, and they have to do security hardening and support every time they add a new format. If they're already working on AV1, why double the cost to add support for an older…
It’s not like Apple can’t bear this cost. VP9 has existed since 2012, Android has supported the format since version 4.4 released in 2013. AV1 was then unheard of. Surely they weren’t working on it then. VP9 is still interesting today since there are many devices out there that decode it and will never decode AV1 with hardware. I think the reason is not technical. Apple has patents for MPEG formats, I think they want…
> It’s not like Apple can’t bear this cost. VP9 has existed since 2012, Android has supported the format since version 4.4 released in 2013. AV1 was then unheard of. Surely they weren’t working on it then.
4.4 shipped with software support, which meant that it was slow and chewed battery like it was going out of style. You had to wait until around 2015-2016 for hardware decoding support and around 2017 for encoding support before it became competitive.
Even then, however, there's a bigger problem: what really matters is the amount of unique video recorded in VP9, which even Google doesn't seem to do. Apple's users almost never run into the situation where they miss out on something because their device doesn't support VP9. Since the entire industry is moving to the newer AV1 format, the question is whether it's worth taking on the long-term security & support commitment of supporting an old-new format or simply putting those resources into something which will actually replace H.264 as a universally-supported format.
> By not supporting VP8/VP9, they force(d) everyone to support their formats.
This is trying too hard to construct a conspiracy theory: VP8 had no advantages over H.264 and arrived years later. VP9 had no significant advantages over H.265 and arrived years later. The only significant source of original content in either one is WebRTC chat, which is a pretty limited hook to justify a major {development,support,security,patent risk} commitment.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry, but your comment has no place here. I was discussing a dead soul with reverence and respect. That is not the time to jump in with "oh but actually he was terrible". That is incredibly rude and poor taste and disrespectful to the dead. Terry Davis suffered greatly from mental illness, specifically schizophrenia. He suffered from confusion. It's quite disgusting that you try to cite some of the ridiculous th…
Please don't attack another user like you did here and below, regardless of how wrong or bad a comment is. The site guidelines ask us all to Be kind. That's always important, but surely even more so when you're arguing for treating someone better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry, dang. I didn't mean to attack them. I got really offended at their hateful comment but next time I'll just flag and move on.
Re: It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
libaom support in ffmpeg is still experimental. ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -strict experimental out.webm Encoding on the CPU is less than 1fps now. rav1e is a bit faster. Hardware encoder support might be available on CPUs in 2020.
Yah rav1e is a bit faster, only a few weeks ago I tried to transcode large test movie was around 8 gbps of h264. I was using a big 20 core e5 and was doing almost 1/2 a frame per second. I seem to recall working out the estimated time to encode to AV1 was about 3 weeks...
Use Intel's AV1 encoder for more speed:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SVT-AV1-...