Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aomedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 70 posts

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

#51

Post by dither8 »

jchw wrote: post #40
dmitrygr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> Opus is also now supported in WebM, but you still can't just decode Ogg Opus

Apparently Ogg Opus and Ogg Vorbis has been supported since 18.4 (Mar 2025)[1]

I think it would be great to see more adoption of Opus in podcasting personally.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

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

#52

Post by craftkiller »

dylan604 wrote: post #35
mirashii wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

The modern set top box / dvd player is the chromecast/firestick/roku/smart tv. They lack the power to do software decoding so they NEED the hardware support. The video platforms want them to upgrade because it'll reduce their costs. Sometimes the same company owns both the platform and the streaming device, which should get things moving even faster.

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

#53

Post by jchw »

dither8 wrote: post #51
jchw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> Opus is also now supported in WebM, but you still can't just decode Ogg Opus Apparently Ogg Opus and Ogg Vorbis has been supported since 18.4 (Mar 2025)[1] I think it would be great to see more adoption of Opus in podcasting personally. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

It's really hard to keep up with Apple's support for open codecs: it's always bad, and it always improves one minor step per year at best. Evidently, I'm behind on it, because I've mostly given up on trying to make software I work on work well with Apple devices by this point. (I can't tell you exactly what's wrong, but I've noticed I still can't get most WebMs to load in Safari on my M1-based iPad... some of them do, some of them do not.)

Apple is hopefully noticing that while major publishers can be swayed by this sort of behavior, lack of support for open codecs and open formats is going to make the iPhone and iPad web experience much worse for people who veer outside of the mainstream for a bit.

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

#54

Post by karmakaze »

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.

Perfect. Apple can implement efficient decode in current/next gen devices then enable support in iOS Safari/WKWebView to chew up battery life of older devices. It's more defensible than Batterygate[0]. For current transition, Liquid Glass might be enough extra load.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

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

#55

Post by dylan604 »

cubefox wrote: post #20
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…

> The image improvement was negligible with the main benefit being smaller file sizes. That's a contradiction because quality improvement and file size improvement are just two sides of the same coin. You can't have a large quality improvement at the same bit rate without having a large file size reduction at the same quality.

Yes, I stipulate your point, but people are not looking for better encodes at the same bit rate. They are only looking for not worse quality at much lower bit rate. One project I was working on had a hard file size limitation, and switching to h.265 was able to get the size under the limit. At one point, I was told to make it smaller by X MBs. The image wasn't even being looked at with each change. This is why I make the distinction the way that I did.

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

#56

Post by brokenmachine »

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…

>IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.

But how can they do that without storing the original uploaded video until it hits that view count?

Do they actually store the original uploaded video somewhere, but reencode for the edge servers to save data/storage?

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

#57

Post by zamadatix »

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?

Media companies want to save on bandwidth, content types keep changing (e.g. HDR), people want live calls to work whenever, and so on as well. At the same time, GIF still isn't completely gone either just because people needed more than what GIF could give them.

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

#58

Post by magixx »

dastbe wrote: post #47
maeln wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of pure compression ratio AV1 compete mostly with h265/HVEC in most cases. It does perform pretty well for low bitrate and specific situation like synthetic noise, but h265 is usually better for higher bitrate situations. Hopefully, AV2 will be able to compete with the future H267. But to be honest, video codec have gotten so good these days, I just hope that we get a reasonably fast open-source encoder. AV1…

Go? I haven't see this particular unit before.

I believe it originates as the French translation of Gb

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

#59

Post by maeln »

dastbe wrote: post #47
maeln wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of pure compression ratio AV1 compete mostly with h265/HVEC in most cases. It does perform pretty well for low bitrate and specific situation like synthetic noise, but h265 is usually better for higher bitrate situations. Hopefully, AV2 will be able to compete with the future H267. But to be honest, video codec have gotten so good these days, I just hope that we get a reasonably fast open-source encoder. AV1…

Go? I haven't see this particular unit before.

Force of habit, o is octet, the French equivalent of bytes.

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

#60

Post by hulitu »

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…

> If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h266 and wait for the open alternative to ship.

But why hurry ? AV3 will come soon and it will be better. /s

Post reply on HN