Is AV1 encoding still many times slower / more computationally intensive than other codecs? I think when they were developing it, it was said that the difference would mostly disappear as encoders got more optimized. (Not because of hardware encoding, apparently; I am learning that in contrast to hardware decoding, hardware encoding is limited and isn't a win if quality is important.)
Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
71–80 of 95 posts
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Unlike mp3s compared to other audio codecs, h264 has the luxury of pretty much ubiquitous support for hardware decoders and encoders against other video codecs, so I believe it will have an even longer life than mp3.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#73Oh look a very long ad.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#74Good lord. This site is objectively annoying on mobile. As soon as I load the page, full-screen cookie consent notice, paired with some support chat widget that was overlapping with the accept/decline buttons on the cookie consent form. Had to turn my phone to landscape mode to get the chat widget out of the way to handle the cookie consent.
Then, as soon as I accept the cookie consent form, the page immediately starts to reload. I cancel the reload/navigation, find the close button for the chat widget, and finally start to scroll and read the content after 20 seconds of fidgeting with the page.
Immediately as I start scrolling, I realize the app bar header banner thing at the top of the page is actually being rendered with position: sticky; or some equivalent, and to top things off they’ve actually done me the favor of including some marketing banner ad about their “video developer report survey” being available, and they went ahead and attached that on top of their app bar, and also made it sticky. I was delighted to see that there was in fact no way to close that ad, as well.
Seriously— why do we make sites like this? The top 1/3rd of my screen is a useless banner and app bar that I have no intent to use whatsoever, the bottom 1/5th of my screen is that stupid chat widget, all I have is… let me do the math here… give or take half of my phone screen to actually read the content of the site.
/rant
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#75Is h264 safe now to implement in things without being surprised by someone hitting you with some license fee or patent royalty? What is the status in it?
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The benchmark should be against x265 though, which is mainstream now
Is it? AFAICT most things are still on h264.
Most things where? Like, the biggest video app on the earth called Youtube uses mostly VP9/AV1 (it will only play H.264 if you don't have any encoding for VP9 OR AV1, which is very, rare).
Netflix also uses H.265/AV1. Amazon, HBO, Disney, etc also use H.265, but I believe only on higher resolutions.
On Apple world even phone pics uses HEVC (HEIC).
I think it's a total mix honestly (Because tiktok/X/Meta uses h264 as far I know).
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#77> YouTube for example, encodes content in H.264/AVC, VP9 and AV1 Why don't I see AV1 in many Youtube videos though? Checking with yt-dlp. It looks like they were planning to use it, but didn't really roll it out.
They totally use, but on more popular videos. A fun fact is that they run (or used to) the same VP9 bitrate for AV1, and thus, the video quality on AV1 was way better (as AV1 is more efficient than VP9).
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? AFAICT most things are still on h264.
Most things where? Like, the biggest video app on the earth called Youtube uses mostly VP9/AV1 (it will only play H.264 if you don't have any encoding for VP9 OR AV1, which is very, rare). Netflix also uses H.265/AV1. Amazon, HBO, Disney, etc also use H.265, but I believe only on higher resolutions. On Apple world even phone pics uses HEVC (HEIC). I think it's a total mix honestly (Because tiktok/X/Meta uses h264 as…
Most things like the rest of the world - H.264 is really the only option.
More technically correctly, more than half the currently in use devices in the world do not support more than H.264
Like all my Smart TVs, my kitchen iMac, my parents’ phones etc. only my phone and my laptop support HEVC.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#79>75% AV1-ready vs 15% HEVC-ready
This means AV1 won, client-side.
Now it is about time for the likes of netflix, youtube, twitch to deploy AV1 server-side.
And we can say goodbye to MPEG and patent encumbered codecs.
Good riddance.
Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding
#80> YouTube for example, encodes content in H.264/AVC, VP9 and AV1 Why don't I see AV1 in many Youtube videos though? Checking with yt-dlp. It looks like they were planning to use it, but didn't really roll it out.
My (not super informed) understanding is that it may also depend on how popular the video is - the increase in encoding time is less worth it if there are few people seeing quality or bandwidth benefits (depending on how they tune it).
>if there are few people seeing quality or bandwidth benefits (depending on how they tune it).
The client readiness is there. Already at 75% (relative to H264 100%, HEVC 15%).
It is thus clear which of the new codecs won client-side; it will only grow from here.
Definitely worth it.