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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.
Shouldn't Google release AV1 for Chromecast? Or are they too busy virtue signaling?
I'm not really up on the current state of video encoding and the article doesn't say but is there any reason this is a big deal ?
I can think of one: when it comes to open standards, Microsoft has historically been so far behind the curve that you had to just assume they might catch up because you couldn't see them anymore. Seriously, do you know how many years it was until they finally fully supported PNG images let alone PNG images with transparency? I'm pretty sure it took two decades.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
VLC media player 3.0.0 reportedly introduces AV1 playback.
(Google Search query: vlc player av1)
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.
It's significant because it's a massive middle finger to MPEG. They made a complete hash of the licensing around H.265 so that nobody can figure it out, and those that can either have to have contributed IP to the licensing pools or get financially raped to use it. So the vast majority of the tech industry threw all their patents together into this effort to cut MPEG out, and by the way made it free of cost to use.
It's supported by ARM, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and many others. Surprisingly, Samsung, Sony, and Qualcomm aren't on the list, so expect some Android hardware to not have hardware support unless they inherit it from an included GPU design.
List of members in the Alliance for Open Media
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.