61–70 of 70 posts
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)
That is 1.6B iPhone + iPad. I wouldn't say that is low market share. It still have 25-30% of devices.
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.
"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?
You will always have to provide H.264 as baseline due to compatibility. And that has a cost of storage. Bandwidth cost have been declining fast, and with AI Capex it doesn't seems to be slowing down either. Meanwhile Storage cost hasn't drop, if anything recent trend suggest it may have plateau and went up for HDD.
H.264 1080P 2Mbps is good enough for a lot of things. Just like how MPEG-2 is still getting encoder improvement ~30 years later so is H.264 encoder.
There are other codec like LCEVC which you can apply on top of H.264 can provide up to 60% bitrate reduction for 4K content. This saves on storage cost and provide enough benefits.
It is only in streaming services like Netflix where the catalog of video are low enough they could afford to re-encode it every 5- 8 months and storage cost is minimal.
Again a new codec introduction is easily a 10 years task. Higher Speed PON is already being tested, while others are working on NGS-PON2 roll out. 5G Home Broadband with Massive MIMO. The true free and open Video Codec may not be AV1 or AV2, but H.264.
Is this intended to be competitive with h.266/VVC? And is it?
AV1 competes with VVC. AV2 will be competitive with h.267
And H.267 ECM is miles ahead of AV2. There are not even in the same category as AOM has stated AV2 intends for 1080P and efficiency. While ECM at its current form is 50x to 100x slower than VVC encode, and 8 - 10x slower to decode. I am not even sure if it will ever be useable.
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…
Anyone use AV1? How good is it? What are your thoughts on AV2?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The way MPEG runs things there are some oddness with the likes of H265. MPEG likes to add little extensions to a codec over time. That's why H265 was first released in 2013 but ultimately had like 10 different extensions after that fact (the last one in 2024). AV1 and VP9/VP8 before that have, in contrast, been pretty much static after they were released. AV1 has had a single errata after it's release. So I could see…
That is some major revisionist history.
AV1 was created to suck all the oxygen out of the room for h265, and hopefully be finished soon enough that most chipsets would implement AV1 instead of h265, because no one would want to pay the royalty fees. This would then be a major boon to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Amazon. Only Apple had vested interest in h265.
Instead, h265 was finished very fast and Apple almost immediately implemented it on their iPhone chipsets, with their end goal being much smaller video recording sizes at high resolution and FPS. Then Intel added h265 decode to Quick Sync. This was the nail in the coffin for AV1. AV1 is only now seeing some limited uptake.
Hopefully AV2 can have its bitstream / spec frozen in time and garner hardware support before h266 does, otherwise the AV codecs will be forever niche because the MPEG group will always have the lead in hardware decode.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
YouTube has always stored the original video indefinitely. When they added 60FPS support, videos going back years were suddenly available with 60FPS without having to re-upload them. Not many people bothered to upload in 60FPS before YouTube supported it, but those that did noticed. (I know from Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter, which did 60FPS before YouTube supported it possibly because they also had their own platform in parallel.)