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AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

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Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#141

Post by Saoshyant »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #127
Vrondi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HEVC is great for giving you quality in a smaller file size, for your local video files (due to being supported by more cameras and phones so far). AV1 has wider support for streaming video online at a higher quality (due to more browser support so far). So, at the moment, they are really best in two different use cases (subject to change, of course).

> HEVC is great for giving you quality in a smaller file size, for your local video files. This is a huge plus in fansub anime scene. 10 years ago, majority of anime are in H264 (720p/1080p 8bit) which is normally 1±GB for each episode that are consist of 25 min. If I want to watch one anime, it will consume about 20 GB of space. Now, majority of them are in HEVC (1080p 10bit) which are about 300± MB for each episode…

If you actually look up AV1 releases like Trix, the file sizes are even smaller, while keeping up the same quality.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#142

Post by brucethemoose2 »

astrange wrote: post #132
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elemental wrote a GPU shader h264 encoder for the Radeon 5870 back in the day, marketed towards broadcasters who needed quality and throughput: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2586 Intel used to write hybrid encoders (that used some fixed function and some iGPU shader) for their older iGPUs. So the answer is yes... if you can fund the right group. But video encoders are hard . The kind of crack developer teams that ca…

Shaders have little benefit for anything with "compression" in the name. (De)compression is maximally serial/unpredictable because if any of it is predictable, it's not compressed enough. People used to want to write them because they thought GPU=fast and shaders=GPU, but this is just evidence that almost noone knows how to write a video codec.

The Elemental encoder was supposedly quite good, but it was a different time. There was no hardware encoding, and high res realtime h264 was difficult.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#143

Post by throw0101c »

pipo234 wrote: post #24
repelsteeltje wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1 Indeed. 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 Str…

> 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.

Well, there's now H.266 as well:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#144

Post by bscphil »

pipo234 wrote: post #24
repelsteeltje wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1 Indeed. 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 Str…

> h265 (HEVC) was all but DoA until years after it's introduction Apple finally decided to embrace it

No? You're talking in terms of PC / phone hardware support only. HEVC was first released June 7, 2013. The UHD Blu-ray standard was released less than 3 years later on February 14, 2016 - and it was obvious to everyone in the intervening years that UHD Blu-ray would use HEVC because it needed support for 4k and HDR, both of which HEVC was specifically designed to be compatible with. (Wikipedia says licensing for UHD Blu-ray on the basis of a released spec began in mid 2015.)

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#145

Post by bscphil »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #38
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #17

What was the situation on its efficiency compared to H.265 and similar?

Its in the same ball park. Both do considerably better than AVC (h264), but many direct comparisons between HEVC (h265) and AV1 compare apples to oranges. Sure you can get 30% lower bitrate, but only at degraded quality levels or higher decode complexity. Also note that HEVC had a considerable head start (5 years?) so performant encoder (or even energy efficient decoders) took a while to catch up. Recent ffmpeg versi…

> Sure you can get 30% lower bitrate, but only at degraded quality levels or higher decode complexity.

Thank you for pointing this out. This thread is a mess of claims at the moment because this simple fact is under-recognized.

There are two accepted ways to compare codecs+settings: either (a) you perform a subjective comparison with the human eye using the same bitrate for both codecs, or (b) perform an "objective" metrics-based comparison where you match measured quality and compare the ratio of the bitrates.

If you're looking only at 1080p SDR 8-bit video, even h264 is already commonly used at bitrates that can approach transparency to the source (visually lossless to the human eye) when encoded well. For example, a typical Blu-ray bitrate of ~30 Mbps can achieve transparency when well-encoded for most sources.

The reason measures like "30%" are misleading is that if you try to match h264 performance at these high bitrates, you won't get anything close to 30% improvement (with HEVC over h264, or AV1 over HEVC). It can be negligible in a lot of cases. In other words, the improvement ratio from increasing the complexity of your media codec depends on the target quality of the encodes used in the test.

AV1 achieves significant improvements ("30%") over HEVC only at the lowest qualities, think YouTube or Twitch streaming. At high bitrates, e.g. something acceptable for watching a movie, the improvement can be much less or even insignificant, and at near-transparency a lot of AV1 encoders actually seem to introduce artifacts that are hard to eliminate. AV1 seems heavily optimized for the typical streaming range of bitrates, and claims about its supposed improvement over HEVC need to be understood in that context.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#146

Post by baggy_trough »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #112
dcgudeman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet no information on what the licensing issue is... This is ridiculous.

Patent trolls probably.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#147

Post by nikanj »

miohtama wrote: post #115
jug wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be treated as a rumor but I heard a Microsoft developer on Mastodon hint that they had been having trouble with a patent troll, so maybe that's the reason behind the kind of obnoxious workaround too. But that they were dealing with it.

AV1 was supposed to be the patent and royalty free contender?

Alas the USPTO is happy to grant patents on anything under the sun, so you’ll never know when someone shows up with a patent for ”simulating a television broadcast via decompressing stored video on a computer” or something similarly broad.

And searching for applicable patents opens you to more liability, so you just gotta go in blind and hope for the best

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#148

Post by yukkuri »

miohtama wrote: post #115
jug wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be treated as a rumor but I heard a Microsoft developer on Mastodon hint that they had been having trouble with a patent troll, so maybe that's the reason behind the kind of obnoxious workaround too. But that they were dealing with it.

AV1 was supposed to be the patent and royalty free contender?

Because the US legal system (and many others) are adversarial, people can still sue you on very flimsy grounds and you still have to respond or you lose by default.

It may very well be that the troll doesn't have a solid case, but you don't hook any fish if you don't get your line in the water

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#149

Post by [deleted] »

sargun wrote: post #99
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much silicon does it take to add an AV1 decoder to a chip? The die area is very modest, but the hard part is building it in the first place. Encoding is more area, but should still be peanuts for Apple SoCs.

Dumb question, is this not a readily available IP block that you can buy? Better yet, why haven't industry partners licensed royalty-free IP for this?

[deleted]

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#150

Post by ZeroGravitas »

astrange wrote: post #136
ku1ik wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL about film grain emulation. Thanks!

Even AVC had film grain emulation in the spec. Nobody implemented it though.

AVC had a bunch of things in optional profiles, which led to spotty support, which is why I specified "default support" in my comment.
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