9 ms·

Daala: Modern video compression for the internet

146 points by setra 10y ago

Klasiaster 10y ago
Part of Daala will be reused in AV1 http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/
MrRadar 10y ago
Daala uses quite a few innovative approaches to video encoding. There's a good set of articles on some of the approaches they've tried at https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/ https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/. Since the formation of the Alliance for Open Media, Mozilla/Xiph's work has mainly shifted towards helping them develop AV1 (for standardization by the IETF hopefully next year) which is mostly based on what would have been Google's VP10. That said, their work on Daala was not wasted as they are working on integrating the most successful parts of Daala into AV1 where it makes sense, such as their entropy coder.
- tornadoboy55 10y ago
  They'll also need to make sure they stick to AV1 for a long-ass time. H264 is fully accelerated. VP8 was supposed to become a bigwig thing, some (alpha) hardware supported started to pop up and then Google nixed it and switched to VP9. Only now are VP9 accelerated CPUs popping up and now they're already planning to switch to AV1 soon.. no damn way the smaller CPU builders (everyone not Intel or AMD) will build in decoding support for another standard that'll be nixxed in a few years. That's also why H265 will (sadly) be victorious, even despite heavy licensing. H264 has been in use for so long without big changes that CPU builders felt comfortable dedicating silicon to it. Unless AOmedia (= Google, Cisco etc.) give a guarantee they won't switch up to 'AV2' or whatever in a few years, it won't see large hardware support. On a sidenote: screw Google for switching YouTube over to VP9 for some bandwidth savings, full well knowing 95%+ of people does not have VP9 acceleration and thus having YouTube absolutely slaughter their laptop battery. H264ify fixes this, but still. ALWAYS put the user first. Edit: to be clear, I know all the big builders (Intel, Nvidia, AMD etc) are part of AOMedia. However, they also all promised VP8 support which never happened, and VP9 support which is more than a generation late.
  - clouddrover 10y ago
    > no damn way the smaller CPU builders (everyone not Intel or AMD) will build in decoding support Companies smaller than Intel or AMD like Chips & Media, VeriSilicon, Polycom, and Broadcom are part of AOMedia: http://aomedia.org/about-us/ http://aomedia.org/about-us/ ARM is also part of AOMedia. So I don't think the claim that there will be no hardware support for AV1 adds up. If anything, AV1 is already well positioned for good hardware support before it's even released.
    - Caspy7 10y ago
      For those comment surfers, here's the list of all the current members of the AOM: Adobe, Allegro¹, Amazon, AMD¹, Amlogic¹, ARM¹, ateme, BBC R&D, Broadcom¹, Chips & Media¹, Cisco, Google, Intel¹, Ittiam, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Polycom¹, Socionext¹, VeriSilicon¹, Vidyo, XILINIX¹ ¹ indicates hardware or hardware IP companies. An article on the codec indicates: > The group is aiming to freeze the bitstream sometime between the end of the 2016 and March 2017. Expect to see browser-based support soon thereafter, with the first hardware support within 12 months after that. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/A-Progress-Report-The-Alliance-for-Open-Media-and-the-AV1-Codec-110383.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...
  - CharlesW 10y ago
    Wow, thank you for the h264ify mention! I can now play 4K YouTube videos on my MacBook Pro, who'da thought?
  - TD-Linux 10y ago
    I don't see how VP9 hardware decoders shipping late means that H.265 wins? There's zero H.265 content on the web right now, so if anything H.265 would need to catch up. Also, the ffvp9 software decoder in Firefox is quite efficient. Hopefully Chrome will eventually ship it too.
    - rasz_pl 10y ago
      90% of TV series and movies I watch come in x265 at half x264 file size.
vdnkh 10y ago
How does this compare to VP9/10 by a "human quality" metric? There's lots of cherry-picking about stats which makes an encoding sound impressive on paper but result in a worse perceptible quality. This is a really good article about testing encoders: https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/05/02/the-worlds-best-vp9-encoder-eve-2/ https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/05/02/the-worlds-best-v... Additionally, adoption is really slow of VP9 already so I don't see anyone switching to Daala soon.
- clouddrover 10y ago
  > I don't see anyone switching to Daala soon No one will switch to Daala. They'll switch to AV1. As other commenters have noted, the AV1 codec is built from Google's VP10, Mozilla and Xiph's Daala, and Cisco's Thor. Wikipedia has a good summary of AV1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 And if you're interested in the source, the AV1 git repository is: https://aomedia.googlesource.com/ https://aomedia.googlesource.com/
- mbebenita 10y ago
  We use a wide variety of metrics to compare codecs, not just the usual PSNR metric: https://arewecompressedyet.com/?job=av1_rt_ctrl_new_twitch%402016-12-20T09%3A23%3A43.974Z https://arewecompressedyet.com/?job=av1_rt_ctrl_new_twitch%4... While none of these metrics are as good as the "human quality" metric, some are better than others, in different ways, so we try to optimize across the board.
  - wyoh 10y ago
    On that note, have you considered adding Netflix's VMAF to AWCY?
shmerl 10y ago
How far did Daala progress? They planned to start beating H.265 both in quality and in efficient decoding in 2016/2017. Did that happen?
- mbebenita 10y ago
  Here is the most recent update on Daala, from IETF 97: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/97/slides/slides-97-netvc-daala-update-01.pdf https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/97/slides/slides-97-netvc-d...
  - CharlesW 10y ago
    > They planned to start beating H.265 both in quality and in efficient decoding in 2016/2017. Did that happen? If I'm not missing something, this suggests that Daala's quality will be comparable to H.265. No doubt encoders for both will continue to get better.
    - shmerl 10y ago
      Not just comparable, the goal was to be ahead.
      - CharlesW 10y ago
        A good goal to be sure, but one that it doesn't look like they'll make. IMHO, "comparable to H.265" may not be as inspiring but is still very impressive. If they can do this without stepping on existing IP, it'll be an incredible achievement.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    Looks like a number of parts are used in AV1, but not lapped transforms?
Animats 10y ago
Last time this was discussed on YC: [1] Except that time it was the "Thor" codec. MPEG-2 is effectively out of patent now for almost all uses. Here's MPEG-LA's patent list.[2] The one remaining unexpired patent [3] only applies to error correction for pay-per-view satellite broadcasts. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 [2] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Documents/m2-att1.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Documents/m2-att1.pdf [3] https://www.google.com/patents/US7334248 https://www.google.com/patents/US7334248
- clouddrover 10y ago
  But what's the advantage of MPEG-2 over VP9? VP9 is royalty-free for all use cases and outperforms MPEG-2. Are there particular expired MPEG-2 patents that make sense to include in AV1?
  - MrRadar 10y ago
    The key is that now all royalty-free codecs can use MPEG-2 technologies as their base instead of having to work around the lack of them.
    - clouddrover 10y ago
      Okay, but which technologies in particular? Since they've already been worked around, what's the advantage?
      - mkesper 10y ago
        Workarounds might have had to sacrifice efficiency or simplicity.
        clouddrover 10y ago
        Might have, but again what's an example? What's a technique from MPEG-2 now available that could have improved VP9 or can improve AV1?
XorNot 10y ago
This all reminds me that modular smartphones would be awesome if the hardware video codec chip could be a module.
visakanv 10y ago
Does it use a middle-out algorithm?

146 points by setra 10y ago

Part of Daala will be reused in AV1 http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/

Daala uses quite a few innovative approaches to video encoding. There's a good set of articles on some of the approaches they've tried at https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/ https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/. Since the formation of the Alliance for Open Media, Mozilla/Xiph's work has mainly shifted towards helping them develop AV1 (for standardization by the IETF hopefully next year) which is mostly based on what would have been Google's VP10. That said, their work on Daala was not wasted as they are working on integrating the most successful parts of Daala into AV1 where it makes sense, such as their entropy coder.

tornadoboy55 10y ago
They'll also need to make sure they stick to AV1 for a long-ass time. H264 is fully accelerated. VP8 was supposed to become a bigwig thing, some (alpha) hardware supported started to pop up and then Google nixed it and switched to VP9. Only now are VP9 accelerated CPUs popping up and now they're already planning to switch to AV1 soon.. no damn way the smaller CPU builders (everyone not Intel or AMD) will build in decoding support for another standard that'll be nixxed in a few years. That's also why H265 will (sadly) be victorious, even despite heavy licensing. H264 has been in use for so long without big changes that CPU builders felt comfortable dedicating silicon to it. Unless AOmedia (= Google, Cisco etc.) give a guarantee they won't switch up to 'AV2' or whatever in a few years, it won't see large hardware support. On a sidenote: screw Google for switching YouTube over to VP9 for some bandwidth savings, full well knowing 95%+ of people does not have VP9 acceleration and thus having YouTube absolutely slaughter their laptop battery. H264ify fixes this, but still. ALWAYS put the user first. Edit: to be clear, I know all the big builders (Intel, Nvidia, AMD etc) are part of AOMedia. However, they also all promised VP8 support which never happened, and VP9 support which is more than a generation late.
- clouddrover 10y ago
  > no damn way the smaller CPU builders (everyone not Intel or AMD) will build in decoding support Companies smaller than Intel or AMD like Chips & Media, VeriSilicon, Polycom, and Broadcom are part of AOMedia: http://aomedia.org/about-us/ http://aomedia.org/about-us/ ARM is also part of AOMedia. So I don't think the claim that there will be no hardware support for AV1 adds up. If anything, AV1 is already well positioned for good hardware support before it's even released.
  - Caspy7 10y ago
    For those comment surfers, here's the list of all the current members of the AOM: Adobe, Allegro¹, Amazon, AMD¹, Amlogic¹, ARM¹, ateme, BBC R&D, Broadcom¹, Chips & Media¹, Cisco, Google, Intel¹, Ittiam, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Polycom¹, Socionext¹, VeriSilicon¹, Vidyo, XILINIX¹ ¹ indicates hardware or hardware IP companies. An article on the codec indicates: > The group is aiming to freeze the bitstream sometime between the end of the 2016 and March 2017. Expect to see browser-based support soon thereafter, with the first hardware support within 12 months after that. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/A-Progress-Report-The-Alliance-for-Open-Media-and-the-AV1-Codec-110383.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...
- CharlesW 10y ago
  Wow, thank you for the h264ify mention! I can now play 4K YouTube videos on my MacBook Pro, who'da thought?
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  I don't see how VP9 hardware decoders shipping late means that H.265 wins? There's zero H.265 content on the web right now, so if anything H.265 would need to catch up. Also, the ffvp9 software decoder in Firefox is quite efficient. Hopefully Chrome will eventually ship it too.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    90% of TV series and movies I watch come in x265 at half x264 file size.

vdnkh 10y ago

How does this compare to VP9/10 by a "human quality" metric? There's lots of cherry-picking about stats which makes an encoding sound impressive on paper but result in a worse perceptible quality. This is a really good article about testing encoders: https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/05/02/the-worlds-best-vp9-encoder-eve-2/ https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2016/05/02/the-worlds-best-v... Additionally, adoption is really slow of VP9 already so I don't see anyone switching to Daala soon.

clouddrover 10y ago
> I don't see anyone switching to Daala soon No one will switch to Daala. They'll switch to AV1. As other commenters have noted, the AV1 codec is built from Google's VP10, Mozilla and Xiph's Daala, and Cisco's Thor. Wikipedia has a good summary of AV1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 And if you're interested in the source, the AV1 git repository is: https://aomedia.googlesource.com/ https://aomedia.googlesource.com/
mbebenita 10y ago
We use a wide variety of metrics to compare codecs, not just the usual PSNR metric: https://arewecompressedyet.com/?job=av1_rt_ctrl_new_twitch%402016-12-20T09%3A23%3A43.974Z https://arewecompressedyet.com/?job=av1_rt_ctrl_new_twitch%4... While none of these metrics are as good as the "human quality" metric, some are better than others, in different ways, so we try to optimize across the board.
- wyoh 10y ago
  On that note, have you considered adding Netflix's VMAF to AWCY?

shmerl 10y ago

How far did Daala progress? They planned to start beating H.265 both in quality and in efficient decoding in 2016/2017. Did that happen?

mbebenita 10y ago
Here is the most recent update on Daala, from IETF 97: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/97/slides/slides-97-netvc-daala-update-01.pdf https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/97/slides/slides-97-netvc-d...
- CharlesW 10y ago
  > They planned to start beating H.265 both in quality and in efficient decoding in 2016/2017. Did that happen? If I'm not missing something, this suggests that Daala's quality will be comparable to H.265. No doubt encoders for both will continue to get better.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    Not just comparable, the goal was to be ahead.
    - CharlesW 10y ago
      A good goal to be sure, but one that it doesn't look like they'll make. IMHO, "comparable to H.265" may not be as inspiring but is still very impressive. If they can do this without stepping on existing IP, it'll be an incredible achievement.
- shmerl 10y ago
  Looks like a number of parts are used in AV1, but not lapped transforms?

Animats 10y ago

Last time this was discussed on YC: [1] Except that time it was the "Thor" codec. MPEG-2 is effectively out of patent now for almost all uses. Here's MPEG-LA's patent list.[2] The one remaining unexpired patent [3] only applies to error correction for pay-per-view satellite broadcasts. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 [2] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Documents/m2-att1.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Documents/m2-att1.pdf [3] https://www.google.com/patents/US7334248 https://www.google.com/patents/US7334248

clouddrover 10y ago
But what's the advantage of MPEG-2 over VP9? VP9 is royalty-free for all use cases and outperforms MPEG-2. Are there particular expired MPEG-2 patents that make sense to include in AV1?
- MrRadar 10y ago
  The key is that now all royalty-free codecs can use MPEG-2 technologies as their base instead of having to work around the lack of them.
  - clouddrover 10y ago
    Okay, but which technologies in particular? Since they've already been worked around, what's the advantage?
    - mkesper 10y ago
      Workarounds might have had to sacrifice efficiency or simplicity.
      - clouddrover 10y ago
        Might have, but again what's an example? What's a technique from MPEG-2 now available that could have improved VP9 or can improve AV1?

XorNot 10y ago

This all reminds me that modular smartphones would be awesome if the hardware video codec chip could be a module.

visakanv 10y ago

Does it use a middle-out algorithm?