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An Open Source, Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Has Been Released (aomedia.org)
Artem Tashkinov writes: After three years in development the Alliance for Open Media is releasing the royalty-free AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification. The AV1 codec promises an average of 30 percent greater compression over competing codecs according to independent member tests.
The release of AV1 includes:
The release of AV1 includes:
- Bitstream specification to enable the next-generation of silicon
- Unoptimized, experimental software decoder and encoder to create and consume the bitstream
- Reference streams for product validation
- Binding specifications to allow content creation and streaming tools for user-generated and commercial video
some obscure company (patent troll) claims this violates all their patents?
AC comments get piped to
meh we all gonna use germanium instead
This is awesome, but it's useless until decoder hardware is prevalent. Expect a year of waiting for deployment to make sense, and 3 before the majority of users can handle it. That said, death to h.254 and h.265.
P.S. Please improve the webm standard to allow multiple audio and subtitle channels. Also add features to switch between these channels in the HTML5 video element. Multilingual videos are important!
Judging from other open source software, that will be a show stopper. Having millions of eyes on the code does not automatically cause the owners of those eyes to give up their day job to hunker down and turn the code into something productive and efficient.
As with VP9 earlier, the first reference AV1 encoder is absolutely slow: currently it's an order of magnitude slower than x265's veryslow preset (which is extremely slow to begin with).
AV1 is not currently supported by anything under the sun except an alpha build of Firefox (where it struggles to decode even a 3Mbps video on powerful PCs).
Most likely ffmpeg will include its own decoder (implementation) because ffmpeg and AV1 developers have contradicting views on coding styles. ffmpeg has its own VP9 decoder.
Apple joined the alliance just a few months ago when the development was almost over, which means Apple most likely didn't really contribute to it at all.
The spec is 619 freaking pages long.
"It takes about 150 seconds on an off-the-shelf desktop computer to encode one second of video."
Someone will kill it if it's not DRM
How badly did they screw up for things like this to happen. Making the competitors (Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc) come together to make a replacement.
This is awesome, but it's useless until decoder hardware is prevalent.
The plan is that the initial quick deployment of it will rely on shader code, so decoding will be hardware accelerated, but GPGPU instead of dedicated hardware code.
On the other hand, you have a bunch of hardware manufacturer on the board too (dedicated hardware manufacturer like Broadcom, GPU manufacturer AMD, ARM, Intel, Nvidia) and they have been taking part in the process, guiding selection of some technology (the reason why ANS was dropped in favor of Daala_ec, as it's more hardware friendly, etc.)
They have probably already started testing hardware implementation while the development process was going on. So maybe AV1 spetialized decoding cores might show up faster than expected.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Which requires a powerful and power hungry CPU, probably complete with active cooling...
Mobile devices won't be able to do it, or won't do it for long before the battery dies.
Which is *also* the case with h265, mostly due to the patent minefield and high licensing costs causing lots of hardware manufacturer to backtrack on their intentions to feature dedicated h265 cores in their latest hardware.
Which is the whole reason Daala, VP10 and the other pieces of what eventually combined into AV1 were started in the first place.
Except for a few select phone (Apple's iPhone) lots of (cheaper) mobile devices haven't started getting real h265 decoding, neither.
And again, AV-1 was designed to be GPGPU friendly.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
VLC has also preliminary AV1 support (since 3.0).
G-Streamer has too (since 1.14)
Bitmovin has started offering experimental AV1 cloud compression for quite some time.
And given the long list of companies involved, more is going to come any moment soon.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... like say... RAMBUS?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
How was this not the first post?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Just get a NVIDIA TX2. Linux/quad arm/gpu/hardware video encode and decode.
The plan of AOMedia was to shift the work to the GPU as soon as possible (think Vulkan/OpenCL compute shader)
And given the names on the list (several hardware manufacturers), you can bet that dedicated hardware AV1 cores are going to come next after that, much sooner speed than you would otherwise expect.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
it's targetting web.
on the web, DRM is handled at another level (EME - encrypted media extensions).
video codecs are orthogonal to it.
basically, content providers don't pay attention if AV1 supports DRM or not (it doesn't).
What interests them is if the browser supports widevinecdm (it does if you browser can play netflix).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It was released in 2009 at 960 GFLOPS @ 85 watts @ 40nm. Capable of running up to 2x that with overclocking and a voltage mod. While in theory you can get an RX460/560 at a similiar pricepoint and 2-2.5x the performance, it is still a perfectly capable card for gaming and other purposes if the applications can work within its hardware constraints. Honestly the biggest issues today are the lack of OCL 1.0/1.1 emulation in Mesa and everything jumping to OGL 4.x/Vulkan 1.x as minimum for their renderers. As far as performance is concerned the card is still more than adequate unless you need more VRAM (Only had 512M 128bit GDDR5), OCL 1.2 support, or 2160p displays (it supports up to 2560x1600 with dual link DVI and had two DVI plus Component standard.)
They had reduced the patent burden, but hadn't gone far enough with their requirements for licensing in a fair manner. He personally is fine with MPEG dying if AOMedia is successful, because the mission goal of MPEG was basically to reach that point, in which case it is mission successful to him.
I find open source to be useful even in cases where it isn't Free Software. There was a time, in the olden days, when you bought software libraries for development that were distributed as a binary and header. These binary only distributions sometimes required royalties, but it was also common to have been a one time charge and royalty free. Either way it sucked because you could not see how it worked, modified it for your needs, or ported it to a different platform. Then this idea of open source hit the scene and started to change that. You still had to pay for it, and sometimes there were royalties, but at least you could adapt it to your tools and didn't have to wrestle with constantly changing calling conventions between different compilers.
If all you care about is Free Software, then great. But I don't necessarily have to participate in your personal religious movement to find benefit from open source and meaning and distinction between the terms open source and Free Software.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
finally it's only 6 months late
Myself, I go for the open sauce solution. Sometimes new jars are way too hard to open, and you have to bang them against the counter to break the seal, etc.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Free software also means absolutely nothing. In fact it in the context that the Free Software Foundation uses it, it is the opposite of free as in freedom because it is about restrictions and obligations - the opposite of freedom.
You saying something about "open source" doesn't mean anything to anyone else. Stop talking as if you saying is meaningful to others - it isn't.
You know what's the state devoid of all rules and regulations - The completely "true" freedom? it's called anarchy.
You're half right. Free software copyleft licenses privilege one type of freedom over another.
Whether you feel it as a restriction or a freedom depends on which part of the software ecosystem you find yourself in, and with which intentions.
Nnnnneeee... nope.
Anarchy != law of the jungle.
Anarchy -> non-hierarchical social organisation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16699481
Bitstream isn't frozen... stuff you encode with this won't necessarily decode correctly in the future.
So I've been checking it out and I can't find anything more than what is described as 'decent" And even that's not all the time. https://droidinformer.org/Stor... This stuff reeks of the corporate empty shell.