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AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

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Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#151
post #125

I love AV1 for compressing my movies to 720p. I also convert any audio to Opus. I get to archive a ton of content on peanuts. The videos look great on my PC monitor or my phone and they come in at around 452MB (1hr 24m video). Here's my script if you're interested in trying it out on your content. param ( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [string]$sourceDir, [string]$destDir = $sourceDir ) $ffmpegPath = 'C:\Users\sergi\Do…

I don't recognize that language. Is it PHP?

[deleted]

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#153
post #139

I love AV1 for compressing my movies to 720p. I also convert any audio to Opus. I get to archive a ton of content on peanuts. The videos look great on my PC monitor or my phone and they come in at around 452MB (1hr 24m video). Here's my script if you're interested in trying it out on your content. param ( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [string]$sourceDir, [string]$destDir = $sourceDir ) $ffmpegPath = 'C:\Users\sergi\Do…

What sort of file sizes are you getting for 720p video in AV1? Are there any other relevant parameters that you tweak, e.g. framerate?

It's there in the comment, both my filesize and the command verbatim. I don't do anything else other than what's in the powershell script.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#154
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's important context! Adoption of HEVC was so slow that I honestly thought it was released around the same time as AV1.

It wasn't really all that slow in general, just slow on dedicated streaming hardware.

Basically, it was the push to 4K (and especially HDR) that caused HEVC to roll-out. In 2016 4K Blu-rays started coming out and they were all HEVC 10-bit encoded. It took a couple more years before dedicated streaming devices and lower-end smart TVs bothered to start including HEVC support as standard because at first 4K content was uncommon and the hardware came at a premium.

Now that it's mostly the de-facto standard, we see HEVC support in basically all streaming devices and smart TVs.

AV1 didn't have any sort of resolution change or video standard change to help push it out the way HEVC did, so it's basically rolling out as the parts get cheaper due to pressure from streaming giants like Google and Netflix rather than due to a bottom-up market demand for 4K support.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#155
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In context of format war, winning means that they earn patent fee from every device. I don't think it's Apple's intension, but possibly Qualcomm's.

Qualcomm isn't even a part of the HEVC alliance patent pool, so that theory doesn't hold. Indeed, the fact that Qualcomm is currently building AV1 support into their next chip (purportedly) puts them at risk of being sued because while AV1 is open, we all know how patents work and there are almost certainly actionable overlaps with the pool. Apple ships probably more devices than anyone, and given that the patent poo…

>Apple ships probably more devices than anyone, and given that the patent pool is huge as mentioned odds are overwhelmingly that it costs them money to support HEVC / HEIC, not the reverse. That theory also is dubious.

This is a nit that doesn't negate your main point: Apple may ship more complete devices than anyone, but Qualcomm makes up significantly more of the SoC manufacturer market share[1] at 29% vs Apple's 19%

[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/infographic-q2...

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Netflix (and Youtube? I forget) will push an AV1 stream if you have the support. This was even mentioned in Apple's show yesterday. So the egg is already there and the chicken is slowly coming, thankfully.

YouTube was the first to support it. They even went to war with Roku over it and Roku killed the YouTube TV app in retaliation to YouTube's mandate that all next-gen devices support AV1, so YouTube went ahead and embedded it inside the regular YouTube app.

Roku's latest devices to support AV1, so I guess either the price came down, they struck a deal, or Roku just lost to the market pressure after Netflix pushed for AV1 as well.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#157

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?

They have been. YouTube was the first big platform to push for AV1

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most of those that were discussed have been implemented. The new list is here [1]. What you see is that they implement different features with Google obviously wanting the browser to be a full blown OS. So they added things like MIDI support and web pages being able to access the battery. The problem with many of those features is that they have been shown by researchers to either (a) be insecure or (b) allow web pag…

Firefox is also against many of the hardware APIs that Chrome pushes

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix (and Youtube? I forget) will push an AV1 stream if you have the support. This was even mentioned in Apple's show yesterday. So the egg is already there and the chicken is slowly coming, thankfully.

YouTube was the first to support it. They even went to war with Roku over it and Roku killed the YouTube TV app in retaliation to YouTube's mandate that all next-gen devices support AV1, so YouTube went ahead and embedded it inside the regular YouTube app. Roku's latest devices to support AV1, so I guess either the price came down, they struck a deal, or Roku just lost to the market pressure after Netflix pushed for…

Indeed. It wasn't the manufacturers who rushed to implement the codec. It's Google strong arming them.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#160

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.

That's not really true; the motion estimation stage is highly parallel. Intel's wavefront-parallel GPU motion estimation was really cool. Real world compression algorithms are nowhere close to optimal partly because it's worth trading off a little compression ratio to make the algorithm parallel.
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