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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

#41

Post by dsnr »

occz wrote: post #21
olowe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more money and more user’s compute being thrown at the problem to get the streaming service’s CDN bill down.

While funny, that's not really what I would call accurate. Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed, and possibly lower disk usage should they decide to offline the videos. Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.

> Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.

I don’t remember ever watching a movie and wishing for a better codec, in the last 10 years

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

#42

Post by nasretdinov »

IshKebab wrote: post #9

We must be reaching the limit at which video codecs can only achieve better quality by synthesizing details. That's already pretty prevalent in still images - phone cameras do it, and there are lots of AI resizing algorithms that do it. It doesn't look like AV2 does any of that yet though fortunately (except film grain synthesis but I think that's fine).

Arguably that's already happening with film grain — you have to extrapolate _what the original probably was_, encode it because it's smaller, then add the noise back to be more faithful to the original despite your image being better.

I imagine e.g. a picture of an 8x8 circle actually takes more bits to encode than a mathematical description of the same circle

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

#43

Post by cornholio »

jonplackett wrote: post #2

It’s pretty amazing people are still finding ways to make video smaller. Is this just people being clever or is it also more processing power being thrown at the problem when decoding / encoding?

I wonder when we will see generative AI codecs in production. The concept seems simple enough, the encoder knows the exact model the decoder will use to generate the final image starting from a handful of pixels, and optimizes towards lowest bitrate and minimum subjective quality loss, for example, by letting the decoder generate a random human face in the crowd, or give it more data in that area to steer it towards the face of the team maskot, as the case may be.

At the absolute compression limit, it's no longer video, but a machine description of the scene conceptually equivalent to a textual script.

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

#44

Post by bapak »

lxgr wrote: post #31
rarisma wrote: post #10

30% over AV1 is crazy, it doesn't feel too long since AV1 released but that was in 2019.

Yet I still only got hardware support for it on my first devices last year. The downside of "rapid" iteration on video codecs is that content needs to always be stored in multiple formats (or alternatively battery life on the client suffers from software playback, which is the route e.g. Youtube seems to be preferring).

Unless they create a codec that GPUs are naturally good at, we will inevitably always be a couple of hardware cycles behind.

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

#45

Post by ozgrakkurt »

cornholio wrote: post #43
jonplackett wrote: post #2

It’s pretty amazing people are still finding ways to make video smaller. Is this just people being clever or is it also more processing power being thrown at the problem when decoding / encoding?

I wonder when we will see generative AI codecs in production. The concept seems simple enough, the encoder knows the exact model the decoder will use to generate the final image starting from a handful of pixels, and optimizes towards lowest bitrate and minimum subjective quality loss, for example, by letting the decoder generate a random human face in the crowd, or give it more data in that area to steer it towards…

There was nvidia videoo upsampling or w/e it is called. It was putting age spots on every face when it was blurry and it used too much resources as far as I can remember

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

#46

Post by _kb »

IshKebab wrote: post #9

We must be reaching the limit at which video codecs can only achieve better quality by synthesizing details. That's already pretty prevalent in still images - phone cameras do it, and there are lots of AI resizing algorithms that do it. It doesn't look like AV2 does any of that yet though fortunately (except film grain synthesis but I think that's fine).

Outside of AV1/2 (and linear media in general) that's already well and truly developed tech. Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS all provide spatial/temporal super sampling to process lower fidelity base renders [0].

There also seems to be a fair bit of attention on that problem space from the real-time comms vendors with Cisco [1], Microsoft [2] and Google [3] already leaning on model based audio codecs. With the advantages that provides both around packet loss mitigation and shifting costs to end user (aka free) compute and away from central infra I can't see that not extending to the video channel too.

[0]: https://mtisoftware.com/understanding-ai-upscaling-how-dlss-...

[1]: https://www.webex.com/gp/webex-ai-codec.html

[2]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftteamsblog/...

[3]: https://research.google/blog/lyra-a-new-very-low-bitrate-cod...

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

#47

Post by joshstrange »

olowe wrote: post #5
jonplackett wrote: post #2

It’s pretty amazing people are still finding ways to make video smaller. Is this just people being clever or is it also more processing power being thrown at the problem when decoding / encoding?

It’s more money and more user’s compute being thrown at the problem to get the streaming service’s CDN bill down.

For those of us who back up media, this can be very appealing as well. I don’t disagree that what you said is a major driving force, but better formats have benefited me and my storage requirements multiple times in the past.

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

#48

Post by RicoElectrico »

amiga386 wrote: post #40
lxgr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I still only got hardware support for it on my first devices last year. The downside of "rapid" iteration on video codecs is that content needs to always be stored in multiple formats (or alternatively battery life on the client suffers from software playback, which is the route e.g. Youtube seems to be preferring).

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…

Maybe not only reference software, but also reference RTL should be provided? Yes, this is more work, but should speed up adoption immensely.

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

#49

Post by whatevaa »

calcifer wrote: post #32
occz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While funny, that's not really what I would call accurate. Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed, and possibly lower disk usage should they decide to offline the videos. Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.

> Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed They also get increased power usage, lesser battery life, higher energy bills, and potentially earlier device failures. > Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved. Right.

If you experience early failure your device is badly engineered.

Mobile/power constrained devices don't use software decoding, that just a path to miserable experience. Hardware decoding is basically required.

Meanwhile my desktop can SW decode 4k youtube with 3% reported cpu usage.

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

#50

Post by alberth »

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 the highest-bandwidth streaming tier.

Not my tv, but a visual example: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

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