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AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

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Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#131

Post by orra »

llm_nerd wrote: post #23
fomine3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two big SoC manufacturers, Apple and Qualcomm, have patents for competitors like HEVC

Apple has a tiny sliver of the patents in HEVC, and while we don't have the numbers I feel pretty certain they pay far more into the pool to ship HEVC in their devices than they get out of it. The same is doubly true of Qualcomm who aren't even a part of the pool. HEVC was finalized in 2013. AV1 was finalized in 2018, and has just finally started getting a robust ecosystem of software and hardware.

That's important context! Adoption of HEVC was so slow that I honestly thought it was released around the same time as AV1.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#132

Post by astrange »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #96
bee_rider wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if encode could run on the iGPU? I think, at least, that one of the biggest use-cases for encode is game streamers (is this right?), they should have decent dGPUs anyway, so their iGPU is just sitting there.

Elemental wrote a GPU shader h264 encoder for the Radeon 5870 back in the day, marketed towards broadcasters who needed quality and throughput: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2586 Intel used to write hybrid encoders (that used some fixed function and some iGPU shader) for their older iGPUs. So the answer is yes... if you can fund the right group. But video encoders are hard . The kind of crack developer teams that ca…

Shaders have little benefit for anything with "compression" in the name. (De)compression is maximally serial/unpredictable because if any of it is predictable, it's not compressed enough.

People used to want to write them because they thought GPU=fast and shaders=GPU, but this is just evidence that almost noone knows how to write a video codec.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#134

Post by 7speter »

pipo234 wrote: post #24
repelsteeltje wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that standards are moving slow, CODEC standards more so. The golden standard is still h264/AVC, which dates back to the nineties. This is primarily due to many appliances (set top boxes, cameras, phones, TVs) using the absolute cheapest hardware stack they can get their hands on.

+1 Indeed. Compared to other standards in streaming media, I'd say that AOMedia has found adoption a lot quicker. h265 (HEVC) was all but DoA until years after it's introduction Apple finally decided to embrace it. It is still by no means ubiquitous, mostly due to patent licensing, which significantly drives up the price of hardware in single digit dollars price range. Anecdotally, consider that Apple's HTTP Live Str…

Was it all but dead because people thought h264 was good enough, until 2.5 and 4k became more prominent in media consumption? It seems really useful if youre doing encoding at resolutions than 1080p, and it makes me less regretful that I have a bunch of recent hardware that didn’t get av1 hardware support :)

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#135

Post by astrange »

eviks wrote: post #84
Strom wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes x265 is not in the conversation for even top 5 HEVC encoders, regardless of presets. [1] It can be especially surprising because x264 is easily the best AVC encoder. For whatever reason (patents, lack of browser support etc) there just hasn't been as much engineering effort put into x265. Now things like NVENC are even worse in terms of compression. Any GPU accelerated encoder trades compression efficiency for sp…

Are there any CPU+GPU pipelines that improve the speed without decreasing quality to the level of current GPU-only algorithms? Seems strange that we have so much compute power in GPU, but no algorithms to use it well for encodes

"GPU encoders" don't use the GPU themselves (shader cores), they use another tiny CPU attached to the GPU. GPGPU does not really help with compression much.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#136

Post by astrange »

ku1ik wrote: post #108
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* No patent fees. * Wide browser support. * High performance open source software decode available on x64 and ARM * High performance open source software encode available, tuned for multicore cloud encoding * default support for film grain emulation which alone can save about 30% bandwidth when content requires it.

TIL about film grain emulation. Thanks!

Even AVC had film grain emulation in the spec. Nobody implemented it though.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#137

Post by 7speter »

dist-epoch wrote: post #21
BoumTAC wrote: post #5

Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?

Chicken & egg problem. No AV1 videos -> no pressure to add hardware support -> difficult to justify encoding videos in AV1

I think a lot of content creators really want AV1 because of the drastic reduction of file sizes. Streaming companies want it to catch on because of the drastic reduction in bandwidth use.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#138

Post by croes »

miohtama wrote: post #115
jug wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be treated as a rumor but I heard a Microsoft developer on Mastodon hint that they had been having trouble with a patent troll, so maybe that's the reason behind the kind of obnoxious workaround too. But that they were dealing with it.

AV1 was supposed to be the patent and royalty free contender?

I doubt that a codec will exist without patent claims once it is widely used.

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#139

Post by kibwen »

sergiotapia wrote: post #83

I love AV1 for compressing my movies to 720p. I also convert any audio to Opus. I get to archive a ton of content on peanuts. The videos look great on my PC monitor or my phone and they come in at around 452MB (1hr 24m video). Here's my script if you're interested in trying it out on your content. param ( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [string]$sourceDir, [string]$destDir = $sourceDir ) $ffmpegPath = 'C:\Users\sergi\Do…

What sort of file sizes are you getting for 720p video in AV1? Are there any other relevant parameters that you tweak, e.g. framerate?

Re: AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support

#140

Post by throw0101c »

throw0101c wrote: post #43
m3kw9 wrote: post #35

What’s so special about AV1?

Compared to H.264/AVC, you can get the same level of video quality in ~half the bandwidth (or double your quality for the same bandwidth). Compared to H.265/HEVC, AV1 has no patents and so anyone can implement it without worrying about licensing (there seem to 3+ groups that need to be paid off). The trade-off is that it is more computation intensive than H.264 (as is H.265).

Self-reply:

Seems that there's now also H.266/VVC:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding

Short 2023 article on H.266 versus AV1:

* https://www.winxdvd.com/video-transcoder/h266-vvc-vs-av1.htm

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