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An Open Source, Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Has Been Released (aomedia.org)

Posted by msmash on from the good-news dept.

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:
  • 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

9 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So, how long before... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are all SORTS of patents on this codec. But everyone patent owner has agreed (and signed) to make those patents available royalty-free to the AV1 group.

  2. Re:So, how long before... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    They can try. But with 30 companies doing IP Review, I doubt they will.

  3. Some caveats by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Some caveats by TigerTime · · Score: 3, Informative

      Damn, give it some time. It was just released. When looking at things like this, you have to look at the backing and support it gets.

      Give it a year or so, and see where we're at. This codec is here to stay, and while the encoding speeds are slow now, it has an enormous backing to win in the end.

    2. Re:Some caveats by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Informative

      Who cares when Apple joined, as long as they did. That's a big pool of patents that they've owned for a long time that became available to the group, and some very deep pockets that can help defend (or at least won't sue).

      With Apple, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nvidia, AMD on board, it's a done deal. In 18 months it will be difficult to find a shipping device that doesn't support AV1 at some level.

      Fuck MPEG-LA. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  4. h265 by DrYak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 ]
  5. Preliminary support by DrYak · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 ]
  6. Re:MPEG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    So badly that the chairman of MPEG says HEVC is unusable.

  7. Re:So, how long before... by roca · · Score: 5, Informative

    It might happen, but it hasn't happened with VP9. It also hasn't happened with Opus.

    Furthermore the AV1 license is structured so that if you sue someone for using AV1, you lose your own rights to use AV1. Thus, only pure-troll entities will be able to initiate such lawsuits. That limitation didn't apply to previous codecs.