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AV1 is Well On Its Way To Becoming a Viable Alternative To Patented Video Codecs, Mozilla Says (mozilla.org)
Here's a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube. That's because about 4 in 5 videos on the web today rely on a patented technology called the H.264 video codec. From a report: It took years for companies to put this complex, global set of legal and business agreements in place, so H.264 web video works everywhere. Now, as the industry shifts to using more efficient video codecs, those businesses are picking and choosing which next-generation technologies they will support. The fragmentation in the market is raising concerns about whether our favorite web past-time, watching videos, will continue to be accessible and affordable to all.
Over the last decade, several companies started building viable alternatives to patented video codecs. Mozilla worked on the Daala Project, Google released VP9, and Cisco created Thor for low-complexity videoconferencing. All these efforts had the same goal: to create a next-generation video compression technology that would make sharing high-quality video over the internet faster, more reliable, and less expensive. In 2015, Mozilla, Google, Cisco, and others joined with Amazon and Netflix and hardware vendors AMD, ARM, Intel, and NVIDIA to form AOMedia. As AOMedia grew, efforts to create an open video format coalesced around a new codec: AV1. AV1 is based largely on Google's VP9 code and incorporates tools and technologies from Daala, Thor, and VP10.
Mozilla loves AV1 for two reasons: AV1 is royalty-free, so anyone can use it free of charge. Software companies can use it to build video streaming into their applications. Web developers can build their own video players for their sites. The second reason we love AV1 is that it delivers better compression technology than even high-efficiency codecs -- about 30% better, according to a Moscow State University study.
Over the last decade, several companies started building viable alternatives to patented video codecs. Mozilla worked on the Daala Project, Google released VP9, and Cisco created Thor for low-complexity videoconferencing. All these efforts had the same goal: to create a next-generation video compression technology that would make sharing high-quality video over the internet faster, more reliable, and less expensive. In 2015, Mozilla, Google, Cisco, and others joined with Amazon and Netflix and hardware vendors AMD, ARM, Intel, and NVIDIA to form AOMedia. As AOMedia grew, efforts to create an open video format coalesced around a new codec: AV1. AV1 is based largely on Google's VP9 code and incorporates tools and technologies from Daala, Thor, and VP10.
Mozilla loves AV1 for two reasons: AV1 is royalty-free, so anyone can use it free of charge. Software companies can use it to build video streaming into their applications. Web developers can build their own video players for their sites. The second reason we love AV1 is that it delivers better compression technology than even high-efficiency codecs -- about 30% better, according to a Moscow State University study.
All these efforts had the same goal: to create a next-generation video compression technology that would make sharing high-quality video over the internet faster, more reliable, and less expensive.
You'll notice "reduction of need for broadband expansion" isn't on that list.
Wasn't Google's first attempt at a streaming video CODEC the now forgotten V8? They sure hyped it as the next big thing...
Ohhh AV *One*
Here's a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube.
Here's a surprising fact: someone else has paid the licensing fee on my behalf, and it cost me very little and I only had to pay it once. Well, twice, I guess; Microsoft and nVidia have probably both delivered me such a decoder.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At the outset, I just want to say how happy I am that AV1 has taken off, and how seriously it is viewed by so many technology companies as a way around H.264 and (even worse) HEVC. Particularly with respect to HEVC, there are three separate patent pools with different participants. HEVC is, in many ways, already set up to fail due to a large number of participants that participate in either none or one of the pools (see https://streaminglearningcente... for how chaotic it is). There are some other proprietary technologies such as Perseus that are out there that claim better performance than HEVC from a PSNR/SSIM perspective, but they will likely remain fringe.
What is of more concern to me is how carefully AV1 has been constructed in terms of its coding tools to avoid patent trolling and patent submarining (e.g. Rambus at JEDEC with DDR). This is a very serious and very technically complex issue, as any company could easily assert patents on AV1 if they feel there is infringement on their claims as pertains to any of the coding tools. There are increasingly limited ways of dealing with spatiotemporal entropy in non-infringing ways that do not involve exponential increases in gates or CPU cycles.
A recent and simple example of this is the MPEG-LA claiming they license patents related to the MPEG-DASH streaming framework. MPEG-DASH is, essentially, an XML schema for a streaming manifest combined with either MPEG-4 Part 12 (the MP4 container originally specified by Apple as the MOV format), or MPEG-2 Transport Streams encapsulating H.264 video. Nobody on the DASH Industry Forum really thought that MPEG-DASH would be subject to this type of activity, yet magically MPEG-LA began waiving it agreement around about two years ago.
As a result, many in the industry have held onto the virtually universally-supported HTTP Live Streaming, which is an M3U playlist with tag extensions and MPEG-2 Transport Stream container for the codecs. Even that standard developed by Apple has never become a fully ratified within the IETF, and nobody knows if the same thing will happen there either.
Incidentally, any time Google has presented VP8 or VP9 at previous conferences and is asked about patents, they avoid answering questions and the audience usually laughs. I've seen it personally, and I think it's the industry's cynicism for the various patent holders and some of their past actions. Where it becomes critical is for silicon suppliers, whose front-loaded costs are now in the neighborhood of nine figures to launch some SoCs, and for content distributors, who invest a tremendous amount of time and money encoding all of the required profiles for streaming to new codecs. Commitment to efficient hardware acceleration by them for the codec is risky, as they could easily be legally enjoined from selling their products if they didn't get their patent licenses in order, and this would also leave content holders scrambling to fall back to already-established codecs.
I will admit I'm cynical here too. While I'd love to see a patent-free open standard, I'm not optimistic that someone will not come out of the woodwork claiming infringement on a key coding tool. I wish Google and the rest of the AV1 participants luck. They'll need it.
Everybody just uses H.265 or H.264. Preferably in a Matroska container.
This bullshit is the reason why my website and services explicitly have a NOLICENSE license agreement wall, before you can enter. So everybody who agrees, has relinquished all his "i.p." claims forever, and broken the "i.p." unlaws of his own country, meaning I can use ALL "his" shit, and he can use "mine" (obviously), without me suing him (as I do not believe in the "i.p." lies because I do not support the coke-headed non-working media industry leeches), unless he ever tries to use those "i.p." unlaws on me. Then I can sue the living fuck out of him according to his own unlaws.
(Yes, it also states that if his jurisdiction does not allow such agreements, then he is not allowed to enter, even if he agrees, and it will be breaking and entering, or even a act of war (invasion). Which means he will also get the living fuck sued out of him.)
Can anyone explain why all the players in broadcast TV aren't pushing to have the next-generation broadcast TV standards (ATSC and DVB-T and stuff) using AV1 instead of H.265/HEVC as the replacement for MPEG2 and MPEG4/H.264? I would have thought that (like everyone else involved with video) the broadcast TV people would be very attracted to a codec without all the license fees associated with H.265/HEVC. Is there something about H.265/HEVC that makes it better for broadcast TV than AV1? Is it simply that AV1 isn't proven enough to be viable for something like the next ATSC standard? Or is it simply that its easier to slot H.265/HEVC into a workflow that already does MPEG2 and MPEG4/H.264?
Seems like everyone else (even the mob that defines standards for cable TV) is largely behind AV1, why not broadcast TV?
But I don't think anyone wants to start at about 16 MBit/s for decent quality video, and 40 MBit/s for typical "high-def" video. (UHD and 4K would be beyond that)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Armchair lawyers are hilarious morons.
It's only just reached 1.0 and the encoding time of the codec is mind blowingly slow. It makes encoding HEVC look extremely fast.
I'm praying that AV1 takes off in a big big way, I like the idea of a superior codec, saving me disk space and being open source and free, my inner PC hippie is into that.
I don't know if it does every single feature HEVC or 264 does mind you, it might be crap at 10bit or 12bit or something, I just don't know, but my understanding is, it's fairly good.
None the less, it's not going to be replacing anything for several years. You need to wait multiple generations for smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs, TVs and god knows what else to have new AV1 capable chips in them. Plus the encoder needs obvious, intense optimisation. Honestly the litmus test is when the piracy teams (or at least a few hardcore anime groups) start using the codec.
When I can replace some of my stuff on my NAS, with something at least 33% smaller and identical or better quality, I'm much more interested.
I do wish them well and I hope these hype articles continue, but patience will be a virtue here.
Any claim mozilla had a significant part in it, other than maybe throwing some cash their way is laughable. Xiph was around for years while mozilla more or less ignored them.
So, when will there be hardware acceleration to make high res playback viable on consumer devices? When will I be able to play 1080p or better on AV1 to my: Android/IOS phone/tablet, media box, DVD/BD player, TV, etc. Just about any TV or BD player for sale these days can handle a USB drive with H.264 video but H.265 support is still pretty rare. Also, how much computer do you need to smoothly stream 1080p or better on AV1? Assuming the average CPU won't cut it, is acceleration available yet on many graphics systems, either discrete or integrated? It looks like even VLC has only had "experimental" support for AV1 since February.
In the summary it says "H.264 web video works everywhere".
This is in fact quite untrue. H.264 does not work on Linux out-of-the-box.
I run a business on Linux and have even written device drivers for it and embedded it into special hardware, so I'm not some babbling idiot who cannot code or follow install instructions. It is certainly true that I will not download code from sites I do not trust and then allow that code to run on any system on my company network. I don't remember if it was that there was no trustworthy site to get the code from; If I have to download code from northkoreanhackers.com and install it with root priv to play H.264 then that's probably why I gave up on H.264 long ago. I suppose it could have been something about the distros I run or the specific hardware of the systems I own, but not a single system I have will play any H.264 video and I've never seen anybody successfully play such videos on a Linux system. I'd bet the situation is even worse for BSD users.
It's just one of the sh** problems in Linux land. If something does not work without somebody monkeying with it, then it does not work and the endless parade of excuses usually offered by Linux fans is meaningless.
If patents make it so you cannot legally ship the code to play H.264 and thus everybody needs to download code from some shady site and effectively violate the law in order to play H.264, then you cannot legally play H.264.
If the problem is not the patents, then this may also be part of a general open source community problem: nobody wants to do the drudge work of making basic stuff work right, everybody just seems to want to add new features or play with the look and feel of the GUI.
It's pastime. Does anyone here even English?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What ever happened with that one which was suppose to already be patent free?
As history has taught us, this is just one of many technologies that derived from the 80s that is in the process to be possibly fast tracked, and replaced for a loyalty-free variant. What is interesting is it took the mass collaboration of multiple groups to put together a newer, and better codec for overall support. Imagine if other technologies were affected the same as they age.