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Microsoft Launches Free AV1 Video Codec For Windows 10 (softpedia.com)
Microsoft has released a free AV1 video codec for Windows 10 devices that's available via the Microsoft Store.
"Play AV1 videos on your Windows 10 device. This extension is an early beta version of the AV1 software decoder that lets you play videos that have been encoded using the AV1 video coding standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media," the company says. "Since this is an early release, you might see some performance issues when playing AV1 videos. We're continuing to improve this extension. If you allow apps to be updated automatically, you should get the latest updates and improvements when we release them." Softpedia reports: Oddly enough, the codec can only be installed on devices running Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which is no longer up for grabs after Microsoft pulled it last month. It remains to be seen how often Microsoft updates the codec in the coming months, but I've already tried it out for a test earlier today and the initial release seems to be running just fine. You can install the codec from the Microsoft Store to be notified when new versions are out, and make sure you report any potential issues to Microsoft for more bug fixes.
"Play AV1 videos on your Windows 10 device. This extension is an early beta version of the AV1 software decoder that lets you play videos that have been encoded using the AV1 video coding standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media," the company says. "Since this is an early release, you might see some performance issues when playing AV1 videos. We're continuing to improve this extension. If you allow apps to be updated automatically, you should get the latest updates and improvements when we release them." Softpedia reports: Oddly enough, the codec can only be installed on devices running Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which is no longer up for grabs after Microsoft pulled it last month. It remains to be seen how often Microsoft updates the codec in the coming months, but I've already tried it out for a test earlier today and the initial release seems to be running just fine. You can install the codec from the Microsoft Store to be notified when new versions are out, and make sure you report any potential issues to Microsoft for more bug fixes.
but is there any reason this is a big deal ?
Yes, AV1 is a royalty-free, efficient video codec that has good industry support. Anyone can implement AV1 without having to pay patent licensing fees, as opposed to H.264 and most especially as opposed to HEVC (aka H.265).
AV1 outperforms VP9 and as time goes on AV1 will become the dominant video codec on the web.
AV1 beats H.265 on quality. The libaom AV1 encoder is still very slow but it's improving, and there are other encoder efforts like rav1e which are faster but don't yet produce the same image quality.
There are various AV1 demos you can try in Chrome and Firefox. I'm using Firefox 64 beta with "media.av1.enabled" set to true in about:config. Bitmovin has a demo.
You can switch on AV1 for YouTube via their TestTube page and try some high bitrate videos in their AV1 demo playlist. Many YouTube videos have AV1 encodes available up to 720p resolution (try popular music videos to see examples), but YouTube's not optimizing for file size yet. The standard definition AV1 encodes typically have smaller file sizes than the VP9 equivalents, but the 720p AV1 encodes are typically of similar or even larger file sizes than the VP9 versions.
An AV1 encoder is about 130x times more complex to encode than HEVC (H.265) when comparing reference models.
See UNDERSTANDING THE VIDEO CODEC JUNGLE: A COMPARISON OF TCO AND COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY.
No wonder the public cloud people like it, you'll pay them a ton of money encoding files!
Live is going to be a real hassle, almost impossible. It is all we can do to get a good 4K live encode with HEVC at reasonable bit rates.
What is really exciting is the next MPEG JVET codec, VVC (likely H.266). Even better performance than AV1 or HEVC, but with a minor increase in complexity.