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AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

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Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#101

Post by dcgudeman »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #27

Microsoft Edge does support AV1, but weirdly only through a Microsoft Store extension [1], even though Chrome has support built-in. This actually really sucks because in practice hardly any normal consumers would bother to install a strangely named extension, and so web developers have to assume it's largely unsupported in Edge. Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid acc…

Although this thread is about AVIF (the image format based on AV1) it claims that Edge is not supported due to licensing issues:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75459594/why-doesnt-edge...

I bet the same licensing issues are also holding back AV1 on edge.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#102

Post by lxgr »

conjecTech wrote: post #59

How much silicon does it take to add an AV1 decoder to a chip? The areas Apple highlighted in their A17 release looked pretty substantial, but I wasnt sure if it was to scale. https://b3148424.smushcdn.com/3148424/wp-content/uploads/202...

I'm pretty sure that a video codec ASIC would share some building blocks across codecs, with per-codec parameterization, so I don't think Apple literally added a single "AV1 box" to the A17/M3 die.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#103

Post by jorvi »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #27

Microsoft Edge does support AV1, but weirdly only through a Microsoft Store extension [1], even though Chrome has support built-in. This actually really sucks because in practice hardly any normal consumers would bother to install a strangely named extension, and so web developers have to assume it's largely unsupported in Edge. Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid acc…

> Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec

I still have a pretty deep dislike for Google for turning on AV1 for everyone in Chromium. It’s the ultimate “fuck you, I care more about my bottom line than your user experience”.

Edit: and clown HN rears its head again. I guess cutting users their battery life to a third is worth it as long as Google saves a little bandwidth?

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#104

Post by baggy_trough »

arbitrarian wrote: post #63
baggy_trough wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the "ever growing set of standards" that Safari doesn't support?

This was discussed here not too long ago. I assume not much has changed since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31902707

So you don't know, but you assume it's the same, so "ever-growing" is just a uninformed slam? If anything the reality is the opposite.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#105

Post by lxgr »

conjecTech wrote: post #97
monocasa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a pure marketing slide. The M3 variants floorplans don't look anything like that, as can be seen on other pictures of the dies. That being said, it's pretty common to have dedicated silicon for video codecs. It normally takes the form of a little DSP with custom instructions to accelerate operations specific to the codec.

I agree that is how I'd expect it to be implemented, but I'm not sure how small it would be given the processing bandwidth we are talking about for 4k video. I'm guessing this is a distinct region of the chip and not integrated with CPU/GPU since they scale up by replicating those blocks and wouldn't want to redundantly place that hardware. Having it separate also allows a team to work on it independently. I think th…

A GPU is also not a monolith. As you say, there are some functions that scale with the number of compute units, but others don't need to (e.g. display scan-out controllers); it would accordingly make sense to make the video coding functions part of the latter.

And video decoding/encoding is definitely at least GPU-adjacent, since it usually also involves scaling, color space transformations etc.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#106

Post by AshleysBrain »

jorvi wrote: post #103
AshleysBrain wrote: post #27

Microsoft Edge does support AV1, but weirdly only through a Microsoft Store extension [1], even though Chrome has support built-in. This actually really sucks because in practice hardly any normal consumers would bother to install a strangely named extension, and so web developers have to assume it's largely unsupported in Edge. Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid acc…

> Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec I still have a pretty deep dislike for Google for turning on AV1 for everyone in Chromium. It’s the ultimate “fuck you, I care more about my bottom line than your user experience”. Edit: and clown HN rears its head again. I guess cutting users their battery life to a third is wo…

Doesn't the Media Capabilities API [1] provide a way to determine if a codec is "power efficient" (presumably meaning hardware supported)? So then you can switch to another codec if AV1 isn't hardware-supported.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Media_Capab...

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#108

Post by ku1ik »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #66
m3kw9 wrote: post #35

What’s so special about AV1?

* No patent fees. * Wide browser support. * High performance open source software decode available on x64 and ARM * High performance open source software encode available, tuned for multicore cloud encoding * default support for film grain emulation which alone can save about 30% bandwidth when content requires it.

TIL about film grain emulation. Thanks!

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#110

Post by lxgr »

bee_rider wrote: post #41
dist-epoch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chicken & egg problem. No AV1 videos -> no pressure to add hardware support -> difficult to justify encoding videos in AV1

I thought Google was the main one behind AV1. Couldn’t they use their position as one of the world’s biggest video platforms to break that chicken egg loop?

YouTube has been supporting AV1 for a while now.
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