21–30 of 210 posts
Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
No AV1 videos -> no pressure to add hardware support -> difficult to justify encoding videos in AV1
Now supported by the Apple M3 chips.
Only decode, not encode. Intel ARC GPUs also do encode.
And their encoders (at least on macOS in the past) usually don’t yield results comparable to software or dedicated quality-optimized encoding ASICs, so if I wanted high quality at low bitrates I’d have to reencode offline anyway.
It would be nice to have it available for video conferencing or game streaming, though.
Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
Two big SoC manufacturers, Apple and Qualcomm, have patents for competitors like HEVC
HEVC was finalized in 2013. AV1 was finalized in 2018, and has just finally started getting a robust ecosystem of software and hardware.
Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
Keep in mind that standards are moving slow, CODEC standards more so. The golden standard is still h264/AVC, which dates back to the nineties. This is primarily due to many appliances (set top boxes, cameras, phones, TVs) using the absolute cheapest hardware stack they can get their hands on.
Compared to other standards in streaming media, I'd say that AOMedia has found adoption a lot quicker. h265 (HEVC) was all but DoA until years after it's introduction Apple finally decided to embrace it. It is still by no means ubiquitous, mostly due to patent licensing, which significantly drives up the price of hardware in single digit dollars price range.
Anecdotally, consider that Apple's HTTP Live Streaming protocol (till version 6) relied on MPEG2TS, even though Apple lay the groundwork for ISO/IEC 14496-12 Base Media File Format aka MP4. The reason was that chips in the initial Iphones had only support for h264 using mpeg2 transport streams, and even mp4 -> mp2 transmuxing was considered too resource intensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Design cycles of hardware is long. The person who benefits from a more efficient codec tends to be netflix/youtube (lower bandwidth costs), and they are far far removed from the chipmaker - market forces get very weak at that distance.
Also, specialized hardware for a specific format feels like a really good way to have a useless part of a cpu if the format stops being used.
I think it's high time the web had a single audio and video codec choice that is both open and widely supported, which is why I've proposed support for AV1 and Opus for the Interop 2024 effort [2] [3].
[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/av1-video-extension/9MVZQV...
[2] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/485
[3] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/484
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two big SoC manufacturers, Apple and Qualcomm, have patents for competitors like HEVC
Apple has a tiny sliver of the patents in HEVC, and while we don't have the numbers I feel pretty certain they pay far more into the pool to ship HEVC in their devices than they get out of it. The same is doubly true of Qualcomm who aren't even a part of the pool. HEVC was finalized in 2013. AV1 was finalized in 2018, and has just finally started getting a robust ecosystem of software and hardware.
Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?