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AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

aomedia.org

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Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#11

Post by craftkiller »

dylan604 wrote: post #9

"AV1 adoption is accelerating" But before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?

I do. I watch scifi shows over the internet with my friends. We watch it together on a web page with an html5 video element served out of my apartment. I've had to re-encode it to 3 megabits per second (to avoid stutter/buffering) with no b-frames. When initially setting it up, I tested both H264 and AV1 at that bitrate and H264 looked considerably worse. No surprise there, considering H264 is old enough to drink (22 years) whereas AV1 is only 7 years old.

Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#13

Post by free_bip »

dylan604 wrote: post #9

"AV1 adoption is accelerating" But before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think I can at least sort of understand why they're going with this speed of release cadence. If the release cadence is too slow, you might end up with another JPEG situation where the new codec is undeniably better in every way, but nobody wants to implement it since the old standard was around for so long without any competition.

Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#14

Post by jjcm »

djfobbz wrote: post #8

Anyone use AV1? How good is it? What are your thoughts on AV2?

I implemented an encoding pipeline for AV1 for vids uploaded to my social news site (think reddit competitor except I'm extremely small fry). I eventually removed the code for it.

While the space savings and quality improvements are good, the encoding speed is an order of magnitude slower than using h264/vp9. In the end the user experience of causing people to wait significantly longer for an AV1 encode wasn't worth the tradeoff. To fix the user experience problem, I still had to encode a h264 version anyway, which kinda defeats the point when it comes to space savings. You still get data transfer improvements, but the break even point for when the encoding costs offset the data transfer costs were around 1000 views per min of video encoded, and as an average I'm far below that.

IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.

Worth keeping in mind I was looking at this ~2 years ago, so things may have evolved since then.

Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#15

Post by dylan604 »

free_bip wrote: post #13
dylan604 wrote: post #9

"AV1 adoption is accelerating" But before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think I can at least sort of understand why they're going with this speed of release cadence. If the release cadence is too slow, you might end up with another JPEG situation where the new codec is undeniably better in every way, but nobody wants to implement it since the old standard was around for so long without any competition.

If you're going to do that, then the new thing must be so much better than the old thing that makes the pain of switching to the new thing worth while.

By the time h.265 encoding was trying to gain traction, h.264 encoding speeds were very fast. The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes. For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that. The switch from MPEG-2 to h.264 had very noticeable quality improvements so it did make it worth while for the slower encodes until h.264 was locked and key code included in CPUs. It was similar to the adoption rates of DVD from VHS compared to Blu-ray from DVD.

Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#16

Post by 6SixTy »

djfobbz wrote: post #8

Anyone use AV1? How good is it? What are your thoughts on AV2?

AV1 is really one of those things born out of internet providers (e.g. Google, Amazon) put together so they can deliver content more efficiently with their bandwidth without needing to deal with a complicated web of royalties in addition to paying said royalties. There's plenty of people using AV1 or it's image format but don't realize it.

Also, video encoding pretty much always comes with the tradeoff of more efficient = uses more processing power

Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#18

Post by brookst »

SpecialistK wrote: post #4
HelloUsername wrote: post #2

Is there any consumer-level hardware available that supports AV1 encoding yet?

Intel Arc, AMD Radeon 7000 series, Pixel 8, GeForce 40, and a few others.

(Disregard, misread encoding as decoding)

~~And iPhones and Macs since the A15 / M3 chips~~

Re: AOMedia Announces Year-End Launch of Next-Gen Video Codec AV2

#20

Post by cubefox »

dylan604 wrote: post #15
free_bip wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think I can at least sort of understand why they're going with this speed of release cadence. If the release cadence is too slow, you might end up with another JPEG situation where the new codec is undeniably better in every way, but nobody wants to implement it since the old standard was around for so long without any competition.

If you're going to do that, then the new thing must be so much better than the old thing that makes the pain of switching to the new thing worth while. By the time h.265 encoding was trying to gain traction, h.264 encoding speeds were very fast. The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes. For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that. The switch from…

> The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes.

That's a contradiction because quality improvement and file size improvement are just two sides of the same coin. You can't have a large quality improvement at the same bit rate without having a large file size reduction at the same quality.

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