Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding • Hacker News Board

Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding

#91

Post by ksec » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:28 AM UTC

jampekka wrote: post #2

Maybe 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 I'm probably not up to date with newer/hardware encoders and please let me know if my view is outdated.

In terms of software encoding that is still the case. You are basically doing a trade-off between, Bit-Rate / File Size and Encoding Time.

We could have EVC which provide same H.264 ( or x264 ) encoding time but 30%+ Bit-Rate reduction. But market seems to want maximum BitRate reduction regardless of computational complexity.

Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding

#92

Post by ksec » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:32 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #20

tombert wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I still cared about saving disk space, I made a cluster of NVidia Jetson Nanos running in a docker swarm configuration [1] to compress my blu-ray rips, but honestly even when you have six computers working at once, H264 on a single computer is still often faster. On the Jetson Nanos I was lucky to get maybe 1fps in ffmpeg using VP9. Multiply that by six boards and that's about 6fps in total; ffmpeg running…

h.264 is from the 90s, so of course it's fast after ~30 years of use. hell, when I first got into encoding, we had dedicated expansion cards to do MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoding because it was so difficult at the time. New codecs always take time in the beginning while the encoding software is tweaked/optimized. Eventually, it becomes part of the CPU hardware and then we all make comments like "remember when ____ was so slow…

>h.264 is from the 90s

I am pretty sure you are thinking of H.263 if it was from the 90s. H.264 barely started in the 00s.

Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding

#93

Post by ksec » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:39 AM UTC

dgreensp wrote: post #71

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.)

AV1 quality encoding complexity will always be higher than most older codec.

That is by nature, I put emphasise on quality, because you could arguably disable all the AV1 features and lower the complexity to VP9 or h.264 level. But then you dont get the bitrate reduction benefits.

Whether that higher computing requirement is justify will be up to debate. And depending on your usage people will have different trade offs.

Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding

#94

Post by ksec » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 6:52 AM UTC

a1o wrote: post #75

Is 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?

>Is 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?

I assume you mean to be included in things where things is either software or hardware? For software you get that for free from pretty much every single shipping PC, Smartphone or Tablet. So you really shouldn't implement it yourself. For hardware you still need to paid a tiny license fees ( which is why RPi 5 doesn't include it )

If you ignore extensions like SVC (Scalable Video Coding) and MVC (Multiview Video Coding) where most people dont use it. The normal H.264, especially baseline and Main Profile will have 99% of its patents expired within next 3-4 years.

Re: Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding

#95

Post by vitorgrs » Mon, Nov 06, 2023, 2:56 AM UTC

LASR wrote: post #78

vitorgrs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They force AV1 and VP9 via software decoding even if your hardware doesn't support it. Youtube been using VP9 for a decade, even without HW support at the time.

Netflix uses AV1 when on mobile data, even if the HW doesn't support as well (for TVs, it need HW decoding).

The only way to not use VP9 on Youtube is if you don't have the codec installed, which is super rare because the codec is open.