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AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

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Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#131

Post by benjiro »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #117
franga2000 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So: 1. camera manufacturers and film crews both do their best to produce a noise-free image 2. in post-production, they add fake noise to the image so it looks more "cinematic" 3. to compress better, streaming services try to remove the noise 4. to hide the insane compression and make it look even slightly natural, the decoder/player adds the noise back Anyone else finding this a bit...insane?

> camera manufacturers and film crews both do their best to produce a noise-free image This is not correct, camera manufacturers and filmakers engineer _aesthetically pleasing_ noise (randomized grains appear smoother to the human eye than clean uniform pixels). The rest is still as silly as it sounds.

> randomized grains appear smoother to the human eye than clean uniform pixels

Does this explain why i dislike 4K content on a 4K TV? Where some series and movies look too realistic, what in turn gives me a amateur film feeling (like somebody made a movie with a smartphone).

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#132

Post by pkulak »

yalogin wrote: post #123
alberth wrote: post #50

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for…

I don't quite follow why compression would cause this. Feels more like a side effect of adaptive HTTPS streaming protocol where it would automatically adjust based on your connection speed, and so aligns with any jitter on the wire. It could also be an issue with the software implementation because they need to constantly switch between streams based on bandwidth.

> side effect of adaptive HTTPS streaming

Adaptive streaming isn't really adaptive anymore. If you have any kind of modern broadband, the most adaptive it will be is starting off in one of the lower bitrates for the first 6 seconds before jumping to the top, where it will stay for the duration of the stream. A lot of clients don't even bother with that anymore; they look at the manifest, find the highest stream, and just start there.

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#133

Post by dan-robertson »

strogonoff wrote: post #99
alberth wrote: post #50

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for…

Content delivery costs a lot for streaming services. After content is produced, this is basically the only remaining cost. It’s not surprising that they would go to extreme measures in reducing bitrate. That’s why, presumably, Netflix came up with the algorithm for removing camera grain and adding synthetically generated noise on the client[0], and why YouTube shorts were recently in the news for using extreme denois…

It feels to me like there are two different things going on:

1. Video codecs like the denoise, compress, synthetic grain approach because their purpose is to get the perceptually-closest video to the original with a given number of bits. I think we should be happy to spend the bits on more perceptually useful information. Certainly I am happy with this.

2. Streaming services want to send as few bytes as they can get away with. So improvements like #1 tend to be spent on decreasing bytes while holding perceived quality constant rather than increasing perceived quality while holding bitrate constant.

I think one should focus on #2 and not be distracted by #1 which I think is largely orthogonal.

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#134

Post by [deleted] »

tliltocatl wrote: post #96
alberth wrote: post #50

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for…

Economically speaking, it doesn't make any sense for them to spend more on bandwidth and storage if they can get away with not spending more.

[deleted]

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#135

Post by quaintdev »

lxgr wrote: post #91
amiga386 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully that improves. The guy giving the presentation on AV2 made clear there was "rigorous scrutiny for hardware decoding complexity", and they were advised by Realtek and AMD on this. So it seems like they checked that all their ideas could be implemented efficiently in hardware as they went along, with advice from real hardware producers. Hopefully AV2-capable hardware will appear much quicker than AV1-capable…

Oh, I don't doubt that it'll be hardware implementable, but it's a shame that current hardware is usually mostly out of luck with new codecs. (Sometimes parts can be reused in more programmable/compartmentalized decoding pipelines, but I haven't seen that often.)

That's reason I prefer firesticks over TVs

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#136

Post by kodt »

dogma1138 wrote: post #92
nickthegreek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for the super affluent, https://www.kaleidescape.com/compare/

This has been more or less proven to be a complete scam, the quality isn’t any better than Blu-ray and in many cases worse. The “best” quality of streaming you have is Sony Core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Core but it has a rather limited library.

I think there are a few examples where the bitrate is higher than a native rip however.

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#137

Post by axiolite »

alberth wrote: post #50

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for…

> You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes.

That can happen at even the highest bitrates if "HDR" is not enabled in the video codec.

Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#138

Post by michaelsshaw »

alberth wrote: post #50

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for…

As a little experiment, I'd like you to set up your own little streaming service on a server and see how much bandwidth it uses, even for just a few users. It adds up extremely quickly, with the actual using being quite surprising.

At the higher prices, I'd have to agree with you. If you pay for the best you should get the best.

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#139

Post by axiolite »

ttoinou wrote: post #98
galad87 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't scale well, something like .av1opusflacwebvtt?

Video codec is the most important though !

Are you deaf? I can't see how anyone else would be happy downloading a file they can watch fine but can't hear.

Re: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

#140

Post by charcircuit »

strogonoff wrote: post #99
alberth wrote: post #50

Will streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for…

Content delivery costs a lot for streaming services. After content is produced, this is basically the only remaining cost. It’s not surprising that they would go to extreme measures in reducing bitrate. That’s why, presumably, Netflix came up with the algorithm for removing camera grain and adding synthetically generated noise on the client[0], and why YouTube shorts were recently in the news for using extreme denois…

>Content delivery costs a lot for streaming services.

The hard disk space to store an episode of a show is $0.01. With peering agreements, the bandwidth of sending the show to a user is free.

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