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