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AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

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Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#181

Post by conjecTech »

colonwqbang wrote: post #180
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...

It's important to understand that Av1 hardware designs have only recently become available. In practice a combined Av1/H264/etc. decoder core is most likely. A lot of logic would be shared. https://www.allegrodvt.com/products/al-d310-decoder-ip/

That makes sense, I'd still like to know what kind of footprint the combined decoder needs.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#182

Post by colonwqbang »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #16
BoumTAC wrote: post #5

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.

The H265 patent licensing situation is famously a mess and has been a big barrier to adoption. Except in circles where people worry less about that sort of thing: Warez, China, ...

The licensing shenanigans of H265 was a big motivator for creating AV1, a royalty free codec.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#183

Post by kccqzy »

londons_explore wrote: post #6
BoumTAC wrote: post #5

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?

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.

YouTube makes their own chips: https://www.protocol.com/amp/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asic...

Netflix doesn't benefit since their catalog is orders of magnitude smaller.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#184

Post by shmerl »

yukkuri wrote: post #148
miohtama wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Someone like MS should have more than enough resources to bust patent trolls in court instead of chickening out.

Also, can't whole AOM pool resources to annihilate those trolls? They'll all benefit from it. So this doesn't make sense.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#185

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

Don’t forget an image codec with HDR (10-bit) support!

Jesus wept, this is just a still frame from any of: h.265, AV1, or VP9. Those, or a JPEG XL file.

None of these work in general, especially outside of the Apple moat.

Oh, sure, you can buy a $4000 flagship Nikon camera that can output HDR files in HEIF format, but they won’t open on Windows and look garbled on Apple devices.

This is so stupid now that the iOS version of Adobe Lightroom can edit HDR photos and export them in three formats… none of which can be viewed as HDR on any iOS device! I’ve never ever seen this kind of retardation before — software that is this fundamentally incompatible with the only OS it runs on!

I go on this rant approximately annually. It’s been about a decade. I expect to be stuck using SDR JPG for another decade at this rate.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#186

Post by derf_ »

mastax wrote: post #111
sargun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm sure the usual suspects (Synopsys, Broadcom, ARM, Xilinx, etc.) would be happy to license something. But from what I can see all the big players make their own. I guess they're easy enough to implement yourself (as a big player) and important enough to not want to leave it in the hands of a third party. There are also likely opportunities for additional efficiencies when you make a custom {en,de}coder for your sy…

My understanding (now several years out of date) is that Arm decided not to pursue licensing a design, because every customer they talked to had requirements that were so different that they would have essentially been one-offs that each required significant additional engineering. I cannot speak to the others you mention.

I believe the team we worked with at Arm during AV1 standardization is no longer there, which is too bad. They were really great guys to work with.

Your suspicion is mostly correct, though obviously you cannot share too much of the DCTs as these must be bit-exact and are different for each of the standards. But especially things like the compressed tile cache for reference frames used in motion compensation are extremely complicated (to save memory bandwidth and power) and entirely shareable. The SRAM used for line buffers is also a lot of area and shareable. And so on.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#187

Post by sergiotapia »

mvanbaak wrote: post #171
sergiotapia wrote: post #83

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…

wait, you convert to 720p and want to play that using a shield pro type of device. This might be ok in your current setup, but as soon as you upgrade the panel to 1080p or 2160p, you would want the source to be in at the same resolution, or better.

I'm aight to be honest. MPV is stuck to the side of one of my monitors. I don't need more resolution at all.

On my shield's I play 4k remux's from a plexshare.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#189

Post by jorvi »

Omin wrote: post #116
miohtama wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's supposed to be royalty free, but there are patents for the techniques used in it which are used defensively. If someone has a patent to a technique used in AV1, then they could still demand royalties and some patent trolls have been trying. Wikipedia has a section on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Patent_Claims

Wasn’t part of AV1’s charm that anyone trying to sue an AV1 licensee would be nuked from orbit by the legal expertise and patent trove of the collective AV1 companies / AOM?

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#190

Post by simondotau »

rollcat wrote: post #162
tentacleuno wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested as to why it isn't a settled manner. In my experience, H265 files tend to strike really nice compression ratios (in the same vein, after an AV1 transcode, I'm typically left gobsmacked). (Or were you talking more about latency? In that case I have to defer to someone with more knowledge.)

h265 has about 20% lower bitrate than h264 at a very similar perceptible quality, but encoding several variants (adaptive streaming) quickly becomes more taxing on the hardware, and support for decoding h264 in hardware is both more ubiquitous and less expensive. As a concrete example, the 2018 generation of Amazon Fire TV sticks supports h265 but gets really hot, so when an adaptive stream offers both h264 and h265,…

Adopting AV1 isn't urgent but it's a good long-term move. The sooner we implement hardware support in new chipets, the sooner it will become as ubiquitous as H.264 is today.

As for the business perspective, major streaming services pay major dollars for transferring data. You could probably pay for every part of the AV1 project multiple times over on the money saved by a moderately lowering of Netflix's outbound data.

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