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:

• 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

Comments

Re:Some caveats

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

At 40% better efficiency than x265, slowness is a given and perfectly forgivable. For all intents and purposes it's like a next generation codec, but license free. Now it "just" needs the hardware to enable it as a viable choice.

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.

I don't see it being a problem except maybe for Apple. The fact they joined shows they reckon its value and I guess it's more than enough "contribution" at this point.

sort of hardware decoding

[DrYak]

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.

Re:So, how long before...

[TheRaven64]

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's not a real problem. The normal way for such lawsuits is to spin out a company that does nothing other than own the patents and license them back to the original company. That company can then sue everyone, but doesn't do anything other than license patents so is immune to countersuits.