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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?
but I'm going to wait for AV2
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.
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?
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.
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I noticed that at the bottom of the article the reason behind this is basically to adopt technologies to improve streaming services. Could this movement also be used to bring in new royalty free physical media? Call me a tin foil hat lover but I do not like the fact that everything is going streaming. People are so dependant on having to move nothing more than a couple fingers for entertainment. Well, I ask you good Sir and Madam what are you going to do when streaming services shut down? In (15)years when majority of people look at physical media like a homeless person. Let's say one day taps run dry on streaming services. (Oh no cataclysmic internet outage) Guess what? All those great tv shows and movies? Lost to your and everyone elses finger tips. As long as there is power and my VHS doesn't eat my tapes - I will always be able to show what life was like before streaming ended the entertainment industry. ;)
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 ]
This should come to Kodi, right?
Right !
ARM and Broadcom are on the AOMedia.
So if you use some tiny ARM computer board you should be covered (by the time Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 is out, its video-core should be able to handle AV-1).
I use Linux on my home-made quad core desktop.
AMD, Nvidia and Intel are also on board.
So probably your future Radeon or Nvidia GPU is going to be able to handle it too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Unless the principals have some nice, cheap silicon in their back pockets, AV1 likely won't go anywhere. AVC/H.264 prevailed over VC-1 in part due to reference hardware decoder designs, and HEVC/H.265 already has dedicated decoder chipsets that can fit in the next iteration of smartphones and STBs easily, freeing up GPUs for whiz-bang interface or more critical number-crunching work.
Most likely they are using the h.264/h.265 reference design encoders. The reason most commercial encoders vary in quality, is because they all use different shortcuts to achieve faster encode times.
This matters tremendously.
Indeed. Especially if you are using GPU acceleration as well. But I wonder if that is part of the equation. NVENC produces garbage comparable to FFMPEG's H.265 encoder, but I still use it because a 10x speed increase matters sometimes. I imagine it matters even more when you're serving half the internet's bits to customers.
I like my movies encoded in RealMedia, they're warmer and the buffering adds to the experience of watching digital video.
Well, it's not like I like Apple's 4th-generation Apple TV anyway. Stupid "touch interface everywhere!" mentality. When my 3rd-generation Apple TV isn't compatible with Netflix anymore, I'll switch to something else.
Which box is the best for Netflix? Take note that I'm in Canada, so I don't care about Amazon/Hulu/whatever USA-only-streaming-services.
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>Even an evil clock is just twice a day
No, that's not how evil.
This has nothing to do with any of this companies standing up for open access or freedoms. It is all about not wanting to pay the royalties and keep all the money for themselves.
So do I have this right? Basically AV1 is VP10, but with two pieces taken from Daala (new symbol coding inspired by Daala, and the directional deringer)?
I'm not sure what other pieces ended up in AV1. There must have been something from Thor in there.
I'm still waiting for a digital version of 8mm film...
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Encoding movies with RealMedia is fun, but it's even more fun using it to post to Sla[BUFFERING]
#DeleteFacebook
This is great at all, especially if in winds up in the webm wrapper. But can the slashdot audience please inform the general plebs about the death of gifs already. Gfycat and imgurs switcher extension .gifv are not gifs. They are motion compressed video files, forced to support h.264 inside mp4 because of apple product users.
Please god can we come up with a new word, the tools people search for in 'how to make gifs' are still out there and i wish them to be quite DEAD
No, it will just serve H.264. All video streaming services will encode to H.264 as their baseline
Good for incumbents like Dailymotion, Vimeo, and YouTube. But how would the operator of a new video streaming service, such as a hobbyist operating a video streaming service on his own domain to stream his own videos, afford the patent royalty for use of each encoder used to transcode video to H.264 and audio to AAC?
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.
https://nokiatech.github.io/heif/ which is presented as the official site.
It's better to look directly at the HEIF git repository than the website. To quote from the HEIF README: "HEIF is a media container format. It is not an image or video encoder per se. Hence, the quality of the visual media depends highly on the proper usage of visual media encoder (e.g. HEVC). Current standard allows containing HEVC/AVC/JPEG encoded bitstreams. This can be easily extended to future visual media codecs."
So right now HEIF supports AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), and JPEG. And in the future in can be extended to also include AV1.
There's something very ironic about these three companies joining an "open media" alliance, while they all rely on DRM *extensively*.
You shouldn't need multicore processors to play a video file. That's why 265 sucks.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!