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Hulu Joins Netflix and Amazon In Promoting Royalty-free Video Codec AV1 (fiercecable.com)
theweatherelectric writes: Hulu has joined the Alliance for Open Media, which is developing an open, royalty-free video format called AV1. AV1 is targeting better performance than H.265 and, unlike H.265, will be licensed under royalty-free terms for all use cases. The top three over-the-top SVOD services (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) are now all members of the alliance. In joining the alliance, Hulu hopes "to accelerate development and facilitate friction-free adoption of new media technologies that benefit the streaming media industry and [its] viewers."
That, and writing a non-prototype encoder, most likely.
Ezekiel 23:20
I see a problem with Bitmovin's comparisons (linked in the article) not telling us which encoder was used for the H.264 and H.265 tests. This matters tremendously - there are shitty encoders producing bad H.264/265, and there are amazing encoders producing excellent H.264/265, at one and the same bitrate. It's like comparing a new audio coded to MP3 and using Xing MP3 instead of LAME, and calling the test legit.
I wonder if GPUs can speed things up?
given that AMD, Nvidia, Intel, ARM, Broadcom are also on board (beside content providers like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Google)
you can bet that Yes, there are going to be GPU implementations.
(And if you've followed the posts of Xiph - you know that they take GPU into account from the beginning).
Also there are already currently cloud based solution that distribute the compression workload accross a cluster.
(Video is split into smaller segment, each segment is independently compressed by a separate job on the cluster, then the compressed streams are concatenated together).
And bitmovin is already providing alpha support for AV-1 as it is now (so they can already test their solution and so, in a few months, on the day when AV-1 hits version 1.00 they are already ready and their users have already tested pipelines).
Actually the only single major player that is missing here is Apple.
Probably because they are betting all their marbles on their own patended H265/MPEG4 HEVC.
They are among the patent owners of the patent - so using/licensing H265 comes much more cheaper for them.
Which was the main reason for everybody else to drop H265 and consider joining Aomedia for AV-1 (between the original patent-pool, the other competing pools that have formed with other sets of patents and patent troll waiting to sue to try to get their share, licensing H265 is a much more expensive adventure than licensing H264/MPEG4 AVC was- To the point that H265 licenses cost a significant part of the price of embed ARM SoC as those used by cheap phones, ruining their competitivity)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you look at the membership lists its the whose who of software, hardware, streaming and editing. It looks like a very real chance of happening unless some of those members are actively sabotaging the process.
What's got me slightly pissed off is why the fuck these assholes all went "Nope, fuck off" to all of those in turn?
They didn't. VP9 is used, for example, by YouTube, Netflix, and Wikipedia. Watch a video on YouTube, right click on it and select "Stats for nerds". If your browser supports VP9 then chances are the video will be playing back in VP9.
AV1 is the successor to VP9.
Quality of MPEG-2 is always greater than MPEG-2 re-encoded into mp4.
There is some encoding and filter tricks you can do to hide the loss of quality somewhat, but is still a loss.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Opus is also in there as the audio portion.