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.
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.
What are you talking about? The opensource implementations of MP3 and H264 quickly outpaced every commercial implementation, I would expect the same for this codec. What they won't be able to do is compete with embedded hardware implementations that will come but history has shown that the opensource version will be less efficient but more feature rich than those hardware implementations.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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)
What are you talking about? The opensource implementations of MP3 and H264 quickly outpaced every commercial implementation,
Really? I used the commercial Fraunhofer MP3 implementation for almost a decade, because the open source Lame was both more resource hungry and gave more artefacts. That's not my definition of "quickly".
So badly that the chairman of MPEG says HEVC is unusable.
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
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
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.
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