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

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

#31

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

jjcm wrote: post #14
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…

Things have gotten a lot better. You were probably using the reference encoder, but there's a newer, much faster encoder: svt-av1.

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

#32

Post by mirashii »

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…

> For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that.

The average user is a consumer of media, not doing encoding themselves. A one time cost for higher encoding to save bandwidth / storage space many times over is almost always going to make some amount of sense.

The real issue here is just a standard chicken-and-egg problem. To use a new codec, you need it to be supported in end user devices. To get it to be supported, you need to show demand... for a thing that nobody can use yet.

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

#33

Post by cogman10 »

kevincox wrote: post #28
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?

h266 (aka VVC) is seemingly ~~late in development~~ (edit: It has been released but doesn't have much hardware uptake yet). They probably want to ensure that people are aware that it will be matched so that they don't commit to it and AV2 ends up a bit late to the party like AV1 is compared to h265 where it had a notable compatibility lead. If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h26…

AV1 competes with h266. They were released near the same date. In many ways h266 has already lost the battle as nobody supports it even though it's been around just as long as AV1.

h267 is still in development and due to be released in 2028. That's the actual competitor with AV2.

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

#35

Post by dylan604 »

mirashii wrote: post #32
dylan604 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For the average user, the increased encoding times did not justify that. The average user is a consumer of media, not doing encoding themselves. A one time cost for higher encoding to save bandwidth / storage space many times over is almost always going to make some amount of sense. The real issue here is just a standard chicken-and-egg problem. To use a new codec, you need it to be supported in end user devices. T…

The switch from MPEG-2 to H.264 had that in droves with the cable companies updating their set top boxes. That was enough demand to drive hardware development. I don't know how many people have cut the cord as I haven't played in that field to see numbers in quite some time. I'm guessing there won't be a big push to switch out boxes to support AV2. Even shiny round disc sales are plummeting to the point there's not really a need for an at home player to use it either. This really feels like something for streaming only. Those can all be software decoders. Hopefully, they can make it work well on efficiency cores and not require GPU cores for decode. As you say, vast majority of people won't need to encode so sure make a GPU encoder

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

#36

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Totally different goal, but I wish there was a liberatory/non/less-encumbered form for realtime video production too.

A lot of good streaming hardware does jpeg-xs, ISO/IEC 21122, for real-time encoding basically from the camera to the mix station. It's still extremely high bit-rate mostly, but very low latencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS

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

#37

Post by dmitrygr »

dabinat wrote: post #30

It would be great if AV1 was as ubiquitous as H.264. Apple is very much holding things back by insisting that Safari only support AV1 on devices with hardware decoding (M3 and higher), even though other browsers use software decoding just fine. (Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)

I suspect (with no inside knowledge) that this is a battery life play. CPU decoding == bye bye battery. It is much better to force the server to serve you something that you CAN hardware-decode.

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

#38

Post by kevincox »

cogman10 wrote: post #33
kevincox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

h266 (aka VVC) is seemingly ~~late in development~~ (edit: It has been released but doesn't have much hardware uptake yet). They probably want to ensure that people are aware that it will be matched so that they don't commit to it and AV2 ends up a bit late to the party like AV1 is compared to h265 where it had a notable compatibility lead. If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h26…

AV1 competes with h266. They were released near the same date. In many ways h266 has already lost the battle as nobody supports it even though it's been around just as long as AV1. h267 is still in development and due to be released in 2028. That's the actual competitor with AV2.

I guess it depends how you looked at it. Performance-wise AV1 seems more similar to h265. Hardware support wise h266 seems to have only had shipping hardware this year?

So I guess neither of these line up 1:1. I tend to see h265 and AV1 competing pretty hard right now so I tend to think of those as one generation and presumably h266 and AV2 will compete as the next generation.

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

#39

Post by adzm »

dabinat wrote: post #30

It would be great if AV1 was as ubiquitous as H.264. Apple is very much holding things back by insisting that Safari only support AV1 on devices with hardware decoding (M3 and higher), even though other browsers use software decoding just fine. (Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)

h264 is 22 years old as well. AV1 is only seven!

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

#40

Post by jchw »

dmitrygr wrote: post #37
dabinat wrote: post #30

It would be great if AV1 was as ubiquitous as H.264. Apple is very much holding things back by insisting that Safari only support AV1 on devices with hardware decoding (M3 and higher), even though other browsers use software decoding just fine. (Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)

I suspect (with no inside knowledge) that this is a battery life play. CPU decoding == bye bye battery. It is much better to force the server to serve you something that you CAN hardware-decode.

For AV1 this is true, but we don't really need to postulate about whether or not Apple plays games to suppress open codecs, they do it constantly. Like when they finally eventually added support for Opus, but not Ogg containers, so you had to stuff Opus in a CAF that only Safari can support. Opus is also now supported in WebM, but you still can't just decode Ogg Opus, and there is still no sensible audio-only Opus container supported in Safari right now.

Apple devices have had accelerated VP9 devices for literally years, which didn't stop them from simply not supporting VP9 during that time period, despite no reason (i.e. battery life) and despite that it has been patent unencumbered for that entire period.

And so much for battery life... If you are on a Wikimedia website on an iPad, it will use open codecs no matter what, and if you are on an Apple device, you might just get a software decoder in WebAssembly instead, if you're not on a new enough OS.

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