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."

Comments

Re:Encoding AV1 is computationally expensive

[93 Escort Wagon]

For home use, I don't really see the point of using these very computationally expensive codecs - it's not like you can make better rips... just smaller ones, and disk space isn't expensive anymore. My hundred-or-so DVD/Blu-Ray collection was ripped to h.264 a number of years ago, and those still work just fine.

However for a commercial service, it's a different argument. Not only do they have tens of thousands of items in their catalogs, but there's also bandwidth to think about. For them, the investment may make sense. However if it's equally expensive, hardware-wise, to decode the streams... then they have to worry whether their customers will be willing to make the investment.

Sheesh. Welcome to the party, pal.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Dirac? Invented for the exact same reason. Theora anyone? Same thing. VP1? Again.

What's got me slightly pissed off is why the fuck these assholes all went "Nope, fuck off" to all of those in turn? Were they hoping to make enough money with locked down codecs at the time that they wanted the ability to enforce rights in codecs? Or just NIH?

Re:Sheesh. Welcome to the party, pal.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Dirac? Invented for the exact same reason. Theora anyone? Same thing. VP1? Again.

What's got me slightly pissed off is why the fuck these assholes all went "Nope, fuck off" to all of those in turn?

It takes a long time to go from inventing the standard and producing a sufficiently competent encoder. Hell, look at mp3 encoding and how right now lame is tons better than the first mp3 encoder. Yet...

Were they hoping to make enough money with locked down codecs at the time that they wanted the ability to enforce rights in codecs? Or just NIH?

The thing is, h265 is a thing. It exists. There's active encoders. The time to gain widespread adoption was 2+ years after the encoder was a thing and that came 2+ years after a first spec was written (that's pretty vague/hazy numbers, but it gives you an idea of the pacing). It's why AV1 is "targeting" h265 by actually being 25% more efficient than it.

That's the real issue with Dirac, Theora, VP1, and Vorbis. Yes, eventually they can proven to be as efficient or more efficient than the current gen, but the goal is to target the next gen so when h266 comes out, there will be a mature-enough competitor. At that point, the next focus group can focus more on AV2 instead of h267.

And believe me, I'm not deriding Dirac, Vorbis, etc. They were necessary steps to show that it's possible to make an open source competitior. And honestly now the open source version of music encoders are better than their proprietary or free versions--Opus is simply amazing at about any given bitrate. But that's a byproduct of not only having a flexible enough spec to cover music encoding at lower bitrates but also a lot of experience in tweaking music encoding to capture the most vital parts of music (or voice with opus in that mode). That's where we see the real potential in future open source video encoders.

Re:Sheesh. Welcome to the party, pal.

[Anonymous Coward]

The economics changed. There are enough large streaming services now that it's cheaper for each of them to work with the others developing a new format than to keep licensing the latest and greatest codecs from MPEG LA. Older codecs aren't up to the challenge of streaming 4K video over the shitty connections that pass for broadband in the States.

Re:Oh...

[king neckbeard]

Even an evil clock is just twice a day. They don't want to be controlled by MPEG-LA and the like, and that competition benefits us all. Granted, it would be better if they were just against software patents.

AV1 still alpha

[DrYak]

That, and writing a non-prototype encoder, most likely.

yup, currently AV-1 is still an alpha.

it's still a playground in which to experiment by activating feature which are currently being developped.
(e.g.: the Perceptual Vector Quantization (PVQ) and Assymetic Numeric System entropy coder (ANS) that were developped at Xiph as part of Daala, can be tested into AV-1)

Wait until it hits AV-1, only then will developers start optimizing performance instead of chasing compression factors.

Re:Encoding AV1 is computationally expensive

[thegarbz]

My hundred-or-so DVD/Blu-Ray collection was ripped to h.264 a number of years ago, and those still work just fine.

So you compressed a high quality source into a smaller file, but you say there's no point in potentially doing it with better quality? You still have the original collection then you could get a quality improvement.

If you don't have the original however you should note that files aren't getting smaller, and the "not expensive" 4TB HDD will quickly fill up if you value your 4K content.