I'm sure AV1 will have it's time. But for now I'm preferring x265 HEVC for hi-fi video (movies etc.).
Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#62Maybe this is not such a concern to audience of this article, but at least for me I'm stuck with h264 because VP9/AV1 encoding is really really slow. I'd love to use the codecs that are open and technically better, but when the video encodes at 1fps, it's too just too convenient to use the magnitudes faster h264. I'm probably not up to date with newer/hardware encoders and please let me know if my view is outdated.
AV1 hardware encode just started rolling out with the most recent GPU architectures so the majority of hardware still has to do software encoding. I'd also guess that a very large fraction of the hardware out there doesn't even have hardware decode for AV1 since it was only the last generation of GPUs that got that. AV1 is mainly solving problems for the platform owners (google/netflix/facebook etc) and h264 will pro…
> I'd also guess that a very large fraction of the hardware out there doesn't even have hardware decode for AV1 since it was only the last generation of GPUs that got that
Don't underestimate dav1d. It's a highly optimized software AV1 decoder:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d
On my nine year old system, 1080p60 AV1 video was unwatchable with early releases of dav1d due to too many dropped frames.
Eventually dav1d got enough AVX optimizations to play the same video on the same hardware with zero dropped frames.
It was an impressive demonstration of what can be achieved when software makes the most of the available hardware.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but AV1 hardware encoding beats x264 software encoding, if thats the only other option (albeit not by much).
x264 opponents are earlier versions of AV1, namely VP8 and VP9. x265 should be what is compared against AV1 when discussing quality and encode speeds. We use x264 for compatibility purposes, if your device is intended to play video, it will decode x264. x265 decoders are in a lot of devices at this point, and AV1 is just now starting to see representation. x264 is like .jpeg and will probably never die.
Yeah y'all are preaching to the choir, but AVC is still the default for... Well, everything, including OP.
It will probably eventually be like mp3, where users are still reflexively encoding to it without a good reason.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#64I'm surprised the HEVC Support figure is so low: 15%! I suppose HEVC is practically only supported by relatively modern devices which have hardware support for it. None of the OS or browser makers want to ship software support because they'd have to pay the license fee. (I paid $1 for the HEVC extension in the Windows Store but I'm sure that's exceedingly rare). Browsers can ship software AV1 support without needing…
In addition to codec licensing fees, another problem with HEVC is the threat of content licensing fees:
https://streaminglearningcenter.com/codecs/codec-royalties-o...
It's just not worth it. Royalty-free formats (like AV1) are the way to go on the web.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#65Maybe this is not such a concern to audience of this article, but at least for me I'm stuck with h264 because VP9/AV1 encoding is really really slow. I'd love to use the codecs that are open and technically better, but when the video encodes at 1fps, it's too just too convenient to use the magnitudes faster h264. I'm probably not up to date with newer/hardware encoders and please let me know if my view is outdated.
Tricks of the trade: why have one computer compress the file when you can split it up into logical segments and have each segment sent to its own encoder?
Because the most common situation where a person would be encoding video is when they are live capturing it from a camera. If you are making a home security camera, recording videos, etc you need an encoder that can keep up.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hardware encoders are very fast and generally better than x264 (but not by as much as you'd think with the x264 slow preset). In addition, there are fast threaded AV1 encoders you may be overlooking, like SVT-AV1. For non-realtime, my favorite is av1an, which also yields better quality than is possible from aomenc and works with pretty much any encoder/codec: https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an
av1an is essentially a "wrapper" around other encoders. I've played around with it lot in the past, but have never seen any real quality gains from using it (as measured by VMAF) instead of just using the encoder directly. Am I doing something wrong? What exactly does av1an buy me (except maybe for better independent threads?)
There's a feature that allows you to try and target a specific VMAF score, but it doesn't work very well. What av1an does do for you is increase the speed by a lot, especially for aomenc and rav1e, which don't scale well with high thread counts. SVT-AV1 doesn't really have this problem.
A faster encode might allow using a slower speed/preset setting, which would increase quality per bitrate a little bit. But I don't really consider av1an a tool that increases encode quality, to be honest.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#67Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
AV1 hardware encode just started rolling out with the most recent GPU architectures so the majority of hardware still has to do software encoding. I'd also guess that a very large fraction of the hardware out there doesn't even have hardware decode for AV1 since it was only the last generation of GPUs that got that. AV1 is mainly solving problems for the platform owners (google/netflix/facebook etc) and h264 will pro…
In the past (with h265 / h264 at least), hardware encoding always ended up with visibly worse quality (and often even bigger file sizes) compared to a software encoder like x264/x265. Do you happen to know if that's still the case? (I guess for use-cases such as live streaming it doesn't matter that much, but for video that ends up in some archive, it's probably less acceptable)
Yes, a YouTuber named EposVox released a video on AV1 hardware encoding when the first Intel dGPUs with support for it released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctbTTRoqZsM
Later on in the video, there are some graphs comparing Intel's AV1 encoder to SVT-AV1 at different speed presets. Even one of the faster presets (9) will comfortably stay above AV1 quality according to VMAF, and if you don't need real-time speeds you can lower the preset to get further ahead of the hardware encoder. (BTW: That video is >1 year old now, and SVT-AV1 had some significant updates in the meantime too. So the software side is probably looking better now.)
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#69I was doing some AV1 research recently and was surprised to find that there is still quite a bit of controversy about whether and how much it is still patent encumbered. In fact one of the top search hits is this HN sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30915369
Also interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747923
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#70Instead of being a "guide" as it says in the title, this is merely comparing AV1 to other codecs, and ends by promoting their own thing. I don't think AV1 needs any "convincing", it's theoretically just better in every aspect. It's the tooling and hardware that needs work.
One of my take-aways after going through it is the cross-over point between h.264 and AV1: it depends on the numbers of expected view. AV1 is computationally more intensive and there's a dollar number assigned to that.
> AV1 is computationally more intensive and there's a dollar number assigned to that.
This will only get cheaper over time as hardware accelerators get implemented and are improved YoY.