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Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

amazon.science

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Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#41

Post by Sunspark »

shmerl wrote: post #33
Sunspark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the older CPUs and GPUs out there that don't have hardware support for AV1?

That's why I said as it's being adopted. Right now it's just the very beginning of this phase (for instance AMD just started providing hardware decode in RDNA2). So I expect this to become a non issue at some point .

As long as they don't take it as an excuse to reduce bitrates further. It's getting pretty bad these days with macro-blocking everywhere. This practice really took off when covid started. I actually cancelled Netflix because of it. Amazon is not as bad for macroblocks, but I have run into a few shows that show macroblocks, such as Mr. Robot.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#42

Post by twelvechairs »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

Writing a native app for every conceivable platform someone might want to watch Prime Video on seems an awful lot of work

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#43

Post by the_only_law »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #38
Sunspark wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but in this case I think the tablet should be usable. Sure it's old and only a dual-core cpu, but checking the list of hardware accelerated qualcomm decoder codecs it supports, it lists: vc1, divx, divx311, divx4, avc, mpeg2, mpeg4, h263. Surely AVC which is h.264 should still be supported.. Maybe it gets tripped up trying to use the software google decoder codecs instead? That said, I am not able to test it an…

Can you recommend any resources for learning about video codecs?

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but this popped up a while back: https://blog.tempus-ex.com/hello-video-codec/

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#44

Post by random_ind_dude »

jozzy-james wrote: post #21
jeffbee wrote: post #12

Prime video has unbelievably bad performance on LG WebOS, and it’s not the platform because Hulu, Netflix, Disney, YouTube are all fine. If this is new and makes their app work acceptably, then great! Just checked and Prime using 90MB in my TV, while YouTube uses 214KB, so maybe I already have the wasm monstrosity.

haven't noticed any performance issues on mine (edit: relative to other apps in that ecosystem) - tho is a newer model. the UHD for in-house productions is pretty darn atrocious tho (looking at you, goliath) edit: HDR, not UHD...tho have only noticed it predominate on their originals vs purchases.

I have an LG UHD TV model from 2020 running webOS and I haven't noticed any performance issues either with Prime Video, UHD, HDR or otherwise. I use Bluetooth speakers/earphones for audio. The sound is almost perfectly synced with the video in Prime while there is a noticeably annoying delay in the Netflix app on the same TV.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#45

Post by Sunspark »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #38
Sunspark wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but in this case I think the tablet should be usable. Sure it's old and only a dual-core cpu, but checking the list of hardware accelerated qualcomm decoder codecs it supports, it lists: vc1, divx, divx311, divx4, avc, mpeg2, mpeg4, h263. Surely AVC which is h.264 should still be supported.. Maybe it gets tripped up trying to use the software google decoder codecs instead? That said, I am not able to test it an…

Can you recommend any resources for learning about video codecs?

doom9 has a lot of good discussion.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#46

Post by nopenopenopeno »

the_only_law wrote: post #43
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend any resources for learning about video codecs?

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but this popped up a while back: https://blog.tempus-ex.com/hello-video-codec/

This is perfect! Thank you!

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#48

Post by root_axis »

exdsq wrote: post #22
ec109685 wrote: post #20

What was the reason for web assembly versus just running rust directly on the target hardware? Is the idea that the constrained WASM environment requires less QA than if the hardware was targeted specifically by the rust compiler?

If you target a WASM VM you’re not tied into Rust itself which seems appealing from a risk standpoint

How so? Your source code is still in Rust so seems like you'd still be tied to it.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#49

Post by jeffbee »

random_ind_dude wrote: post #44
jozzy-james wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haven't noticed any performance issues on mine (edit: relative to other apps in that ecosystem) - tho is a newer model. the UHD for in-house productions is pretty darn atrocious tho (looking at you, goliath) edit: HDR, not UHD...tho have only noticed it predominate on their originals vs purchases.

I have an LG UHD TV model from 2020 running webOS and I haven't noticed any performance issues either with Prime Video, UHD, HDR or otherwise. I use Bluetooth speakers/earphones for audio. The sound is almost perfectly synced with the video in Prime while there is a noticeably annoying delay in the Netflix app on the same TV.

To be clear, my beef is with the browsing UI, not the playback. The playback on all these devices is handled by dedicated hardware. It's not like Amazon's app is decoding videos in a WASM VM.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#50

Post by lukasb »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

Native apps are harder to update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30110265
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