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.
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.
a patent troll magics up some patent relating to AV1 ?
Good thing this is a real open source project so you can check.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Without further due
For all intensive purposes, this has peaked my interest in one foul swoop.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Here you go: https://github.com/xiph/rav1e
Nowadays, everyone already uses H.265. ... Nobody cares.
With regard to the licenses
Nowadays, the streamer negotiates with the client to chose the codec. People watching Netxflix on a Chromcast are probably using a different codec to those watching Netflix in a web browser and those watching Netflix on an ipad. Streamers care about the license fees - they will chose the cheapest codec that the client supports.
Web browsers will have AV1 support next year and hardware devices will probably start rolling out in 2021. There's a huge installed base that won't have AV1 support, but the same thing is true for H.265.
You can see which codec Youtube is using in a web browser by right clicking on "Stats for nerds". On most systems I see it's using VP9.
UHD Bluray and ATSC 3.0 (the upcoming US television broadcast standard) both use HEVC. Newer smartphones use it for encoding video taken with their cameras. AFAIK video sites like Youtube don't use it for distribution because software decoding is impractical on older mobile devices (and Google was pushing VP9 instead, which Youtube does use).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
What were you saying about HEVC being too expensive to be available in less-expensive devices?
$40 for a 4k HDR h.265 Roku is pretty much mainstream. Which means aV1is dead-in-the-water.
AV1 hardware acceleration will be TWO YEARS behind the $40 Roku, and you can be sure that it will cost OVER $100 o release (like the first 4k Roku).
HEVC enjoyed early adoption beause of early phone spec war. My Galaxy S4 had HEVC playback built in,
HEVC encode support was added to devices after the S4 a Apple, because video storage space is limited on a cellphone. The TVs have actually been slow to adopt HEVC compared to the rest of the industry, but 4k TVs with HEVC haw been around fo five years now, an 4k BluRay is almost two years old. Both are standard devices that don't support AV1.
The other upcoming standard hat will also kill AV1 is ATSC 3.0.
https://www.atsc.org/newslette...
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
LOL nobody uses H.265 in wide distribution
Nobody except for netflix and streaming producers who offer 4k.
Nobody except for anyone producing any content for VR.
Nobody except for live streamers who have native hardware codecs available.
AV1 is the future, but HEVC will be around for quite a while yet. AV1 risks missing the boat entirely. There are native hardware decoders and encoders available in pretty much every computer right now. They are shipped with graphics cards, mobile phones, in TVs, media players, they are required for 4k Netflix support for example.
AV1 runs the very real risk of being killed overnight. Their hardware codecs are behind the game with a new generation of higher resolution A/V equipment being shipped with HEVC codecs right now which embeds those codecs and entrenches them in the market. If MPEGLA pull their heads out of their arses and makes the codec as cheap to use as MPEG2, AV1 will almost certainly be as dead in the water as Theora was.
There's a huge installed base that won't have AV1 support, but the same thing is true for H.265.
My several year old budget graphics card boasts a hardware h.265 decoder. As does my TV (pretty much every 4K TV does), any UHD bluray player, any computer with a Skylake or more recent CPU (though you could happily decode UHD in software on Haswell)
You can see which codec Youtube is using in a web browser by right clicking on "Stats for nerds". On most systems I see it's using VP9.
And? Netflix uses HEVC for 4k streams, as do UHD blurays. The install base is far larger than you think.
If MPEGLA pull their heads out of their arses and makes the codec as cheap to use as MPEG2
The problem is that it's not just the MPEG LA. It's HEVC Advance, it's Velos Media, and it's individual companies that aren't in any patent pool. There's a reason why Leonardo Chiariglione calls HEVC an unusable modern standard.
AV1 will almost certainly be as dead in the water as Theora was
Theora never had the backing AV1 has. Theora wasn't on the roadmap for YouTube and Netflix.
And again AV1 only has the backing due to the licensing issues.
No, it has the backing because it has better licensing and better quality at the same bitrate (or the same quality at a lower bitrate) than HEVC.
Netflix: I have a great idea,
The great idea is that Netflix accounts for 15% of downloads globally, so AV1's bitrate savings over HEVC are needed.
pretend to not be capable of VP8
I think you mean VP9. If you really are only blocking VP8 then you're probably using VP9 a lot without even realizing it.
It's amazing how well people use the unusable.
There's no value in the HEVC tax any longer. AV1 is the future. Might as well get on board.