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Google added HEVC support in Chrome

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Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#52
post #27

The word "quietly" should be banned from all tech headlines. What should Google have done? Launched a $10M marketing campaign to publicize this change?

Chrome does have "new features in this update" pages so your comment is pretty off

And who knows, maybe they still plan on putting HEVC support in their release notes at some point.

My "new features in this update" section is often 6+ months delayed - as in I will have had access to a feature for 6+ months before seeing it in Chrome release notes.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#53
post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

Did you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds.

A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable.

Edit: just retried on my laptop:

0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 av1_test.mkv

It's that slow that I don't even get the file size to change on disk, still 0 I guess the ffmpeg encoded buffer is still too small to be flushed out after a minute.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#54
post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

> does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding

I'm rooting for AV1 just the same as everyone else, but it's still nowhere close to HEVC in terms of hardware support, or even general quality/efficiency. It's just going to take some more time.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#55
post #53
post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

Did you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds. A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable. Edit: just retried on my laptop: 0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki:…

For what it's worth, Intel & Netflix's AV1 encoder SVT-AV1 is extremely fast -- it changed my mind about what encoder rates are possible with AV1, to the point that I'm very happy with realtime CPU encoding.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#56
post #53
post #10

On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266. Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware…

Did you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds. A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable. Edit: just retried on my laptop: 0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki:…

Try compiling ffmpeg with `--enable-librav1e` and use the `rav1e` encoder implementation. It's supposed to be the fastest software encoder, though of course it can still quite slow depending on the settings.

If you have a newish Intel CPU they're supposed to have good AV1 hardware encoding support. See SVT-AV1. (which ffmpeg also supports: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1#SVT-AV1 )

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#57
post #55
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds. A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable. Edit: just retried on my laptop: 0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki:…

For what it's worth, Intel & Netflix's AV1 encoder SVT-AV1 is extremely fast -- it changed my mind about what encoder rates are possible with AV1, to the point that I'm very happy with realtime CPU encoding.

I will try that because libaom was really slow.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#58
post #27

The word "quietly" should be banned from all tech headlines. What should Google have done? Launched a $10M marketing campaign to publicize this change?

How about just add it to release notes? Or mention it in the blog post for the new Chrome version? "Quietly" fits perfectly in this case if it didn't do either of those, when it's actually a huge deal.

Chrome does not have release notes. The blog post only mentions CVE fixes and points you to Git logs for the rest of the work. Only a tiny number of new Chrome features (out of the thousands of changes and bug fixes done in every release) get further marketing treatment, and they are obviously going to focus on those directly relevant for users over a new video codec. Just because they didn't call out the change anywhere doesn't mean they are being secretive about it, as the title wants to imply.

Re: Google added HEVC support in Chrome

#59
post #15

Every new software and hardware is moving towards the royalty free, agile and efficient AV1 codec. But out of nowhere and 9 years after its release, they add support to the mother of all royalties HEVC codec. Probably had some kind of deal to benefit their android partner Samsung, since they own pretty much most of HEVC patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...

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