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DASH playback of AV1 video in Firefox
- mariusmg 9y agoSo this AV1 coded will superseed H.265 and will be truly open ? Color me impressed if this si true.
- aw3c2 9y agoYes! The future is bright for video codecs. :)
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoIt's suppose to compete with H.265 though it's still in development since 2014. The project was based on Google's VP10 and Xiph's Daala. The codec will be open and royalty-free.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoIt's an H.266 competitor. H.265 competes with VP9.
- mtgx 9y agoWhatever the successor to h.265 it will come a few years too late. This has also been VP8 and VP9's problem - they came years after h.264 and h.265, respectively, were on the market. The difference is AV1 will be here before MPEG-LA's next codec, and now virtually all chipmakers will support it within 8-12 months of the final spec being released, instead of having Google beg chip companies for the next 2-3 years to implement its codec with small/moderate success. Additionally, I don't think anyone will want to pay MPEG-LA for its next codec, just because it shares a name with h.265.
- threeseed 9y agoThere's no business driver for the "next codec" though. H.264 was driven by 1080p. H.265 was driven by 4K. What's the killer use case for AV1 or H.266 ?
- kibwen 9y ago> What's the killer use case for AV1 or H.266 ? The evisceration of net neutrality creating a clear market incentive to reduce 4K video bandwidth by 30%. :P
- thomastjeffery 9y agoAV1 is not patent-encumbered. AV1 can be implemented with free software everywhere. No more leaning on H.264 where you are arbitrarily disallowed from using H.265, not to mention when you are also disallowed from using H.264! AV1 will outperform H.265, even at low resolutions and framerates. That coupled with free software compatibility, and support from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA means that it will have great hardware and software support everywhere.
- threeseed 9y agoVP8 was patent encumbered. Nobody knows if VP9 is but it is highly suspected to be. AV1 won't outperform H.265 when there is no hardware support for it. That's the whole issue here. AV1 is dead when you have major platforms not supporting it e.g. iOS, OSX, PS4, XBox and almost every photo camera.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago> Nobody knows if VP9 is but it is highly suspected to be. {{By whom}} VP9 is out and widely deployed now, yet no patent litigation has ensued. Meanwhile, there are now three patent pools demanding license fees for HEVC, with the latest one appearing just months ago. If you fear litigation, one option sure seems a lot safer.
- illicium 9y agoThe better format does not always win, and just like VHS, H.265 already has much deeper market penetration in hardware.
- Ace17 9y ago(AV1 dev here) Yes, this is true. This codec is developed by the Alliance for Open Media, whose goal is to provide a patent-free video codec (more acurately, a video codec under a patent-umbrella protection). Let's not reproduce the HEVC fiasco (see "HEVC advance licensing terms" for more info). AV1 is still in development at this time (the bitstream format changes slightly almost every day). However, the compression performance (VQ) is already very good ; and lots of huge companies are part of the Alliance ( Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Mozilla, ... see http://aomedia.org/about-us/ http://aomedia.org/about-us/ )
- samsonradu 9y agoAs someone working in the web live-streaming space I will hold my breath until I see Apple on that list. There's always a party-breaker among the big players when it comes to supporting new tech. And then there we go again transcoding and adding software layers to make it work for everyone.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoIf it is implemented in Firefox, that means it works on OS X. Apple is free to continue to devalue their products by refusing to support features, just as its customers are free to spend their money elsewhere. > And then there we go again transcoding and adding software layers to make it work for everyone. If that is what you want to do, that will work. If users want to support a platform that limits them to lesser quality, let them. Be explicit about why they are getting lesser quality. Your software is not part of the Apple ecosystem, Apple is part of your software's ecosystem.
- FranOntanaya 9y agoThere's only so many times you can answer a client "this won't work on Safari" before adding another layer feels inevitable.
- vetinari 9y ago
- threeseed 9y agoNo it will never supplant H.265 and it's open but not necessarily free. The number of companies supporting H.265 far exceeds AV1/VP9 and the biggest wildcard is: Apple. You simply can't have a codec that doesn't work on iOS or OSX. End of story. And you already know who has won by looking at torrent sites which have almost zero AV1/VP9 content but lots of H.265. And we already know that VP8 was riddled with patent infringements and ended up getting a license from MPEG-LA. VP9 has not yet been tested in this respect and could easily require royalties from implementers in the future.
- muizelaar 9y agoH.265 does not have a clear path to victory over VP9. Even with only YouTube serving VP9 I suspect it's already much more widely used than H.265. Given the current state of the world it seems more likely that Apple will be forced to support VP9 in Safari than the other browsers being forced to support H.265.
- threeseed 9y agoWhere have you been ? H.265 is shipping on far more hardware today. It's been shipping on Intel, AMD, Nvidia components for years and is the standard codec for the PS4 and Xbox One. It's also the standard for broadcast terrestrial TV which means set top boxes, TVs etc. And Apple is a patent contributor to H.265 so zero chance of adopting VP9.
- TD-Linux 9y agoYet no one wants to use it because of the content fees. Lots of Alliance companies also helped develop and have patents on H.265, it shouldn't be an obstacle to shipping AV1.
- merb 9y agoHEVC (H.265) is only used in germany for DVB-T2 (all other countries do use H.264). And DVB-T2 is not in widely use (even DVB-T was a failed product). I guess the only users of DVB-T2 are campers. (edit: Currently DVB-T2 is only free for open senders (ARD, ZDF, senders which are paid by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", the rest costs money. it's not in wide use and probably never will Astra Sat / Eutelsat or cable (DVB-S2/DVB-C which all only use H.264) is probably the way which most people go, after the DVB-T debacle. And heck even than H.264/H.265 is implemented by DVB-T2 vendors but DVB-T2 does not need H.264/H.265 it can be used with AV1 aswell.)
- mmastrac 9y agoVery cool. I hope we can start seeing WebAssembly-pluggable codecs in all of the video/audio paths in the browser. Imagine being able to turn on a brand-new codec (or select a customized codec for your particular use) in any browser that supports WebAssembly. Two ends of a WebRTC connection could even negotiate codecs based on power/processing needs, with one sending a WebAssembly codec to the other as a fallback if needed ("hey you don't support this thing that I support in hardware, but you are plugged in, so burn some more electrons on your end"). WebAssembly SIMD [1] will definitely help with performance here. [1] https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6533147810332672 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6533147810332672
- markdog12 9y agoSurprised to see the decoder was not a WebAssembly module.
- mmastrac 9y agoI would assume (completely uninformed assumption, however) that WebAssembly without SIMD won't be performant enough to decode this in realtime.
- markdog12 9y agoJavaScript doesn't have SIMD
- microcolonel 9y agoJavaScript was once to have SIMD. ;- ) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/SIMD https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
- markdog12 9y agoYep, but now just WebAssembly
- ArtCreator 9y agoIt would be nice if Firefox would just work, you know, for everything? I want to use this browser so bad full time, but I'm constantly getting stupid little things that just won't work. This is just another example.
- markdog12 9y agoVery cool to finally see this in a browser. The video continually stops for me though, although audio is still playing. Looks like it's making use of the GPU to decode as well. Both CPU and GPU usage were pretty high for me. Edit: I think the GPU usage was high due to using WebRender
- mrguyorama 9y agoI had a similar issue, Firefox nightly on a Macbook
- TD-Linux 9y agoThat can sometimes happen if the CPU gets too far behind. There is a bunch of missing SIMD code at the moment - I'd expect it to be at least 4 times faster by the time it ships.
- shmerl 9y agoCool! > While Opus was adopted as a mandatory format for the WebRTC wire protocol, we don’t have a similar mandate for a video codec. Now if we could play audio in all browsers using Opus. Even Apple started supporting Opus, but being Apple they messed things up and you can't use Ogg container there :(
- buckminster 9y agoAV1 is a silly name when AVI is an existing video format.
- bjoli 9y agoavi isn't a video format, it is a container format. The container for av1 will probably be mkv or MP4 (or whatever comes after)
- ajobaccount2017 9y agoDoes it include DRM?
- TD-Linux 9y agoNo, but DRM is at the container level, so nothing prevents you from adding it.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y agoDRM is usually implemented at a completely different layer.