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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."
Currently AV1 encoding with common encoding tools is a very time consuming process, as can be seen in the below screenshot taken from a Lenovo T540p notebook with an i7-4800MQ, 8GB RAM running Ubuntu 14.04. It would take 8 hours and 42 minutes to encode a 1080p@24fps 40 second long sequence (Tears of Steel Teaser) with a target bitrate of 1.5Mbps.
I wonder if GPUs can speed things up?
It will take about 10 years for it to become a viable standard. Considering how many devices out there that won't support it. I know that I won't rush out to replace my Smart TV that can now handle H265 and H264. Nor will I be re-encoding my videos until forced to, which would be around 15-20 years IF IF IF this 'new video code' (heard this story before) becomes viable.
Like Apple pushing for the HEIF that uses the h265 codec.
During their HEIF presentation at WWDC 2017 (video and transcript, slides) Apple made the point that the HEIF format is designed to be codec agnostic. Apple will be using HEIF with H.264 and H.265, but in principle you could use any codec inside HEIF. HEIF itself is just an image container format.
I imagine Apple will support AV1 eventually. If and when they do, they could go ahead and use AV1 in HEIF.
There's something very ironic about these three companies joining an "open media" alliance, while they all rely on DRM *extensively*.