111–120 of 190 posts
What I'm interested in is seeing how this will improve the AVIF image format. AVIF stomps the competition for low-bitrate still images (where chroma subsampling is used). For lossless images, not so much. Lossless JPEG XL and lossless WEBP make lossless AVIF look like a joke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardware encode is required if you want things like video calls, camera recording and such to use it. It isn’t required for content distribution platforms which aren’t realtime and the cost of encode is easily made up by hundreds of thousands of streams.
One of the interesting usage of AV1 was specifically for low bitrate calls, and software encoding was perfectly fine, even on mobile. With low enough resolution, framerate and bitrate, you can get a quality stream without significant encoding artifacts compared to any other codec. It is in production right now and has been for a while. The tradeoff CPU / bandwidth is quite advantageous in situations like this. And no…
You really want hardware decoding on mobile, otherwise you end up with 40 minutes battery life. Fortunately, for typical videoconference resolutions, VP8 and H.264 are just fine. AV1 is nice to have, though, due to excellent support for synthetic content (screen sharing), and for scalable video coding (a much more elegant solution than simulcast, IMHO).
In the world I live in, the general plan is to stick to VP8 and H.264 for the time being, and to skip to AV1 when it's universally available on mobile. I haven't seen any features of AV2 which would justify waiting for it.
I'm not a expert on video encoding But i wonder if the future could depend less on fixed-function compression methods and more on AI networks that recreate the video but weight much less that a compressed video. Neural codecs such as github.com/Orange-OpenSource/Cool-Chic
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates > likely will remain so til ~2028 when the first av2 hardware accelerated chips start dropping This might sound dumb, but whats the point if its intended for slower devices, but those slower devices don't even exist yet?
It's not for slower devices, it's for lower data transfer bills for providers like YouTube.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gave up using Chrome a decade ago. It’s a power sucking pig. Safari has its own issues, but at least it’s usable. When I need something that isn’t Safari, I use Firefox.
Safari has a terrible developer experience and has been behind in implementing the various browser API for years, including AV1 support.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'll be surprised if anything comes of it because like... https://aomedia.org/about/members/ if the legal departments of all these corporations haven't made them drop av1 in all these years there's probably not much there?
I'd like to think so as well (well, I don't know they'd necessarilymake them "drop" it as much as license those particular patents/accept the risk they may have to pay in the future) but on the other hand history has shown VP8 had a lot of companies behind it too before Google signed to sublicense patents from the MPEG LA & other holders for it.
So it's not accurate to say that had a lot of companies behind it. That usage came later and even then it was mostly in odd corners of the video industry.
A few things - this is one step in a long, LONG path. AV2 is currently unusable in its current state (the encoder typically runs at around 1fps on good hardware), and likely will remain so til ~2028 when the first av2 hardware accelerated chips start dropping. Even then, I wouldn't expect AV2 streams to be common til 2030. IMO, if it were just the efficiency gains on the table (which are substantial - ~20-30% over AV…
What I'm interested in is seeing how this will improve the AVIF image format. AVIF stomps the competition for low-bitrate still images (where chroma subsampling is used). For lossless images, not so much. Lossless JPEG XL and lossless WEBP make lossless AVIF look like a joke.
AVIF is for sure my favorite image format right now. No other format has the quadfecta of lossless, HDR, transparency, browser support. Plus as you said, for very compressed images it looks amazing. It blows my mind how small AVIF files can be. Also, unlike HEIC and Ultra HDR JPEG, it actually supports HDR natively as part of the file format rather than doing the hacky sidecar gain map trick. I know it doesn't matter…
1. Lossless AVIF is a joke often beaten by WebP and even PNG. Even worse for grayscale.
2. Chroma subsampling remains a bad idea for still images unless the resolution is high enough to hide the artifacts.
3. Tooling is the worst part, AV1 encoders are basically focused 99% on video and leave a measly 1% to image; unlike JXL, of course. SVT-AV1 still doesn't do YUV444 and libaom was unusable. Fortunately, the unpaid enthusiasts were here: https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/the-multimedia-renaissanc... (and more recently https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/oavif/)
I don't see AVIF being used for lossless, which is the largest reason I'd prefer JXL to win: one codec to rule them all sure is an alluring future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to think so as well (well, I don't know they'd necessarilymake them "drop" it as much as license those particular patents/accept the risk they may have to pay in the future) but on the other hand history has shown VP8 had a lot of companies behind it too before Google signed to sublicense patents from the MPEG LA & other holders for it.
VP8 was developed by a small company and bought and open sourced by Google on a fairly short timescale because the proprietary codec group had tried to start exerting their control. So it's not accurate to say that had a lot of companies behind it. That usage came later and even then it was mostly in odd corners of the video industry.
AV1 is being actively claim-charted by a lot of companies right now, and lawsuits are almost certainly coming. The same process is already starting for AV2, but most players are waiting for the AV1 cases to mature first. People keep calling the AV-family codecs “royalty free,” but in practice they increasingly look like a legal and financial gamble.