Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
They can try. But with 30 companies doing IP Review, I doubt they will.
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.
How is it useless? You can easily decode it via software.
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.
TVs and STBs won't be able to do it as they typically contain low power general purpose processors, one containing a powerful general purpose processor would require active cooling and be noisy - not what you want while trying to enjoy a movie.
It will take a while before this will see much adoption, although its a welcome start.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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 ]
Every disclosed patent owner has agreed to make their patents available royalty free. There may be other patent holders who have not disclosed their patent. Patents are not mutually exclusive, if I hold a patent for doing X then you may hold a patent for doing X with Y, so just because my patent is in the pool doesn't mean that AV1 doesn't infringe yours. Expect to see patent trolls with overly broad patents that may or may not actually either apply to AV1 or be valid at all go after smallish (large enough to be worth suing, small enough not to be able to afford a good defence) users of AV1. This has happened with MPEG patents, even though they provide a financial incentive to disclose valid patents that are infringed (anyone with patents in the pool gets a share of the royalties).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 ]
You've got the 1st (Apple), 2nd (Alphabet/Google), 3rd (Microsoft), 4th (Amazon), and 6th (Facebook) most valuable company in the world on the list, plus countless others in the top-50 list. Their lawyers are plentiful to support AV1. (note this list was quickly pulled from a source that is about a year old, I know their rankings have slightly shifted since then, but the main fact still remains that they're the powerhouses of the entire world now)
There's more to life than PCs. Try decoding h.265 on a phone or tablet that doesn't support hardware decoding. On my three year old Sony tablet, playing back high definition h.265 movies in MX Player with software decoding, the frame rate is unwatchably low, and I hate to think what it does to the battery life. I have to make sure when selecting files for a trip, that I stick to h.264. There's no reason to think AV1 will be any easier to decode in software than h.265. Given that mobile is, you know, quite important, you've got a problem there. Not useless, but you've got to wait until the majority of hardware supports it before it can be widely used.
... like say... RAMBUS?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about AV1 is a tactic HEVC patent pools have started to use. Velos Media says it's a nice codec you've got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to it.
How was this not the first post?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
some obscure company (patent troll) claims this violates all their patents?
if you're that paranoid then best stick with MPEG-2 and MP3 until the patents on AV1 and Opus expire.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Adding x to y patent doesn't make it novel and thus would invalidate the combo x and y patent. Derivative works are not patentable.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Apple was not a founding member by they joined as a governing member some time ago.
C'mon man, almost all of us here can count to 50.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
We get patent lawsuits on some of the worlds largest countries who take Patents very seriously. Find some obscure patent troll had made some lame patent in the past that no one would think of even bother looking for because it is so obvious that only a moron would try to Patent it and a moron patent official would approve it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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 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.
If I'm watching movies on my i7 I don't really care if I'm using a large fraction of my CPU performance in software decode since I'm not really doing anything else with my computer. (I don't normally watch a movie while playing a game and typing up my thesis)
For STB, you could probably still do software decode on a more powerful one. I haven't tried it yet, but Nvidia Shield might have enough grunt to do the job at 1080p. (I doubt 4K, but I don't have a 4K TV yet)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Not necessarily. If the inclusion of x is both novel and not obvious, then the second patent would be valid. However, the holder of the second patent would not be able to practice the second approach (with X and Y) without the consent (i.e., license) from the original patent holder (owner of Y).
Eloquent words can mask much mischief. Judge Mayer
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
crawl -> walk -> run
I'm pretty sure Nvidia, Intel, and AMD have something to say about that.
AOMedia has the math working, and a published spec. Now they go over the code and make it faster, and work with the hardware guys. With the general hate for MPEG-LA out there, I wouldn't be surprised if in three years we look back on H.264 the way we look at MPEG-2 today. Man, that was a great standard back in the day, but the files are HUGE compared to AC-1!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Oh boy...that's gonna take a while!
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'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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Everything in your comment is incorrect. Please read a little bit about patent law before commenting on it in the future. Derivative works are part of copyright law and have no status in patent or trademark law. Most patents are additive in some way, providing improvements to existing inventions (many of the early ones were refinements on steam engine design, for example), and this property is one of the first things that you'll find in any patent law textbook.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
This:
"Making the competitors (Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc) come together to make a replacement."
Gives a very strong clue as to why free licensed solutions continue to get development. They just get developed by funding from people who actually need the solution rather than a middleman who wants to build it and license to all those people.