VideoLAN Announces Dav1d, a New Libre and Open Source AV1 Decoder (jbkempf.com)

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLan and developer of VLC media player, made the following announced Monday: AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft,...). AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free, while HEVC patents licenses are insanely high and very confusing.

The reference decoder for AV1 is great, but it's a research codebase, so it has a lot to improve. Therefore, the VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on a new decoder, sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media. The goal of this new decoder is: be small, be as fast as possible, be very cross-platform, correctly threaded, libre and (actually) Open Source. Without further due, the code: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d Recommended: A talk during VDD 2018 conference about dav1d.

Comments

Re: Content creation is too expensive

[MachineShedFred]

LOL nobody uses H.265 in wide distribution because nobody can afford to with the multiple patent pool licensing. It's dead, and will never generate the revenues needed to fund development of any further standard. MPEG killed the golden goose and sent their members to build their own org to cut them out, and AV1 is the result.

The codec will get faster with optimization and forthcoming hardware en/decode acceleration, just like all codecs do.

Nice FUD though.