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AV1 Release
- shmerl 9y agoCongratulations! Now we need more adoption of hardware decoders for it. And then patented stuff will start being phased out everywhere. > AOMedia Supporting Quotes It's interesting, how Apple are notably missing from there. It's as if they want to keep their support quiet.
- clouddrover 9y ago> And then patented stuff will start being phased out everywhere. JPEG is patented, VP9 is patented, and AV1 is patented. Luckily, baseline JPEG is licensed under royalty-free terms and so are VP9 and AV1. The issue is never the patents but rather the licensing of those patents.
- shmerl 9y agoPatented as in patent rolls demanding fees for it. AV1 is not patented, as in trolls can get lost.
- jhoechtl 9y agoThis will shake up the digital media industry. You can safely bet on this format, it's going to stay for long and promisses extremely good compression quality ratio.
- CharlesW 9y ago> This will shake up the digital media industry. You can safely bet on this format… (1) Maybe (2) Not today, and realistically not for a few years (if ever). "Standard" (whether de jure or de facto) compressed media formats (e.g. MP3, AAC, H.264) depend on an ecosystem of supporting products and services, and the existence of that ecosystem for any given format can't be assumed.
- FullyFunctional 9y agoThis is awesome. I started tracking AV1 and TLS 1.3 1.5 years ago and they arrived within days of each other. I hope AV1 will get the kind of love that got us the x264 encoder. EDIT: my timeline was slightly off and reworded is make it clear I understand the difference between spec and implementation.
- m1el 9y agoIt's a nitpick, but a necessary one. x264 is a codec. An implementation of H.264 standard. x264 is loved because it is very optimized and fine-tuned. There are plenty of H.264 implementations that aren't. We're probably not going to see AV1 implementations on the same level as x264 for at least a few years.
- FullyFunctional 9y agoI am COMPLETELY aware of the difference and I was deliberate in writing that. We need the kind of love, hard and excellent work on AV1 software (encoder is the harder, being open ended) that brought us the x264 encoder. AV1 decoders will come aplenty I have no doubt and I'm hoping for a good FPGA implementation.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aroman 9y agoThat was entirely the point of the comment that you replied to correct.
- Shtirlic 9y agoIt's correct that av1 based on vp9? So vp9 codecs exists and can be used as start for av1 implementation?
- BTeam 9y agoThe base was VP10 + tools from Thor (Cisco) and Daala (Xiph.Org/Mozilla), and it evolved from there to AV1 through a process of "experiments", test, IP checks and then its enablement. Assuming that VP10 shares a significant base design with VP9 it would not be surprising if some part of VP9 sillicons decoders could be leveraged on customer hardware, while awaiting for more dedicated circuits. But on the software end, libaom (AOM reference implementation) is indeed a fork of libvpx. But this library is not broadly considered a good implementation, even for VP9. Pehaps the guys behind EVE for VP9 [1] will produce an AV1 implementation based of their codebase. [1] https://www.twoorioles.com/eve-for-vp9/ https://www.twoorioles.com/eve-for-vp9/
- Flott 9y agoI can only hope that AV1 is gonna get some traction. It's hard to believe since MPEG-4 and HEVC are already everywhere. I know that the AOMedia foundation was created in response to MPEG-4 HEVC licensing... Having an alternative might help getting rid of the HEVC!
- shmerl 9y ago> It's hard to believe since MPEG-4 and HEVC are already everywhere. HEVC is far from being everywhere. Huge services like Youtube, Amazon Video, Netflix and others are going to use AV1, not H.265. H.265 is already dead, it just didn't admit defeat yet.
- atonse 9y agoAnd Apple joining AV1 group was probably the nail in the coffin.
- unwiredben 9y agoI don't think HEVC will go away; there's already a lot of fixed-function embedded hardware out there with HEVC decoders that will never get AV1 support. All the streaming players have to support those for the foreseeable future.
- shmerl 9y agoHardware gets obsolete. Fees for HEVC do not, so new hardware won't be using it. For the legacy support, video services will use H.264 like Youtube does now. They just won't offer higher resolution in such cases, which is fine.
- MertsA 9y agoThere's already tons of devices with H.265 encoders and decoders in hardware. Those aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Plenty of high resolution security cameras use H.265.
- shmerl 9y ago
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoBeen a long time coming. Hoping to see some benchmarks and reviews soon.
- ksec 9y agoI am more looking forward to future release. The current version is mostly a bitstream freeze. And it is anywhere from few hundred to few thousands times slower at encoding. While the current version isn't optimized at all, I wonder how long would it take them to reach, say within 5x the speed of x265. In another news, we have xvc, which is taking most of the H.266 purposed ideas into its implementation. And it is already showing 30% better compression then AV1. Note: AOMedia have also updated its website.[1] One thing i notice is Apple is the only one not using its Logo in the member site. And this feels a little strange. [1]https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ https://aomedia.org/membership/members/
- FullyFunctional 9y agoI figured everyone understood this, but you are right, it bears spelling out: Any modern [video] compression format is extremely flexible and allow great liberty for the compressor (whereas the decompressor is strictly defined). This means that there is ample room for work on improving the quality and efficiency of the compressor for years to come. In other words, AV1, the spec, isn't some magical unicorn. It's the sandbox in which the 'corns can be raised.
- blattimwind 9y agoCompressing a video looks like a huge decision tree to me, and newer standards add more interdependencies and more variables at each stage. I'd expect that the resulting optimization problems approximated by encoders are computationally difficult. (Which would explain why they always get better even after many years)
- xiphmont 9y agoShort answer: yes Long answer: yes
- Daiz 9y agoMy personal analogy for this is that video encoding standards are basically like toolkits for building houses, while encoding software is like a robot trained to build those houses using the tools in question. New standards bring new tools to the toolkit, but training the robots to use them effectively is going to take its time and is often even worse than the previous robots in the beginning simply because the older robots have gotten so proficient with their respective toolkits. x264 in particular is basically the top robot in this department and the standard which any new entrants should aim to beat both in quality (not necessarily too hard) and in time efficiency (which is the much bigger challenge).
- sorenjan 9y agoIs ffmpeg able to encode to AV1?
- mulvya 9y agoNo. With the bitstream only just frozen, I expect decoder/encoder wrappers for libaom to take a few months.
- sorenjan 9y agoIs it expected that libaom will be the de facto standard open source enoder, like x264 is for h.264?
- Knowbody42 9y agoWho knows? But ffmpeg should be able to include multiple different encoding libraries for av1 regardless. libaom would be one of them at least.
- Daemon404 9y agoThe bitstream isn't frozen yet. As an aside: A wrapper within FFmpeg for libaom is only a few hours work, but if you want to play with it Right Now, VLC has support. A native decoder will indeed take significantly longer though.
- markdog12 9y agoI noticed a while back AV1 flag was added to Chrome Canary, but I can't find any videos on the web to test it on. Firefox Nighly can play https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/
- yolostreet 9y agotry http://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/v2.6.5/samples/dash-if-reference-player/index.html?url=https://bitmovin-demos.commondatastorage.googleapis.com/googleAV1_Dec2017/test_v1_internal_test20170915/stream.mpd http://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/v2.6.5/samples/dash-if-r... on canary
- markdog12 9y agoWorks, thx. Is that video the only one available? Also, it's capped at 720p 800kbps, anything higher? Would love to see how it does at 4k.
- remir 9y agoIt's great to see all these companies working together on this.
- mtgx 9y agoAll the more disappointing to see both Google and Microsoft embrace HEIF for images in their next operating system versions. They really couldn't wait another couple of years to develop an open AV1-based image format? Come on. Who cares about what Apple does or doesn't do? Apple certainly doesn't seem to care what Google and Microsoft do, which is why it continues to ignore open standards like Vulkan and now went ahead and adopted another one of MPEG-LA's proprietary and patent-encumbered formats. Because they couldn't wait, now we may be stuck with another proprietary standard for the web for another 20 years. Not to mention there could still be others besides MPEG-LA to claim patents on HEIF and accuse developers of infringement, just like it happened with HEVC. This mess could have been avoided with a little bit of patience.
- clouddrover 9y ago> All the more disappointing to see both Google and Microsoft embrace HEIF for images HEIF itself is a container format. It currently supports JPEG, H.264, and H.265 bitstreams: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif https://github.com/nokiatech/heif Nothing precludes AV1 from being contained in a HEIF file.
- robert_foss 9y agoNothing practical is precluding AV1 from being included, however: > HEIF is a visual media container format standardized by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) So corporate politics will surely prevent it from happening. That being said I did file a bug report: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/issues/46 https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/issues/46
- clouddrover 9y agoNetflix is ahead of you: https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/
- TUSF 9y agoHonestly, couldn't they just adapt WEBP for it? It's basically just an RIFF container with a VP8 key frame. Then again, it's WebP, and there's no need to bloat that thing anymore. Edit: Nevermind, I see. Going by the document, it's meant to be an exact mirror to HEIF, but for AV1. Some interesting features too.
- _up 9y agoBut how good is the quality? I watched the Mozilla Demo and at the 30 second mark the "Robot Hand" distorted the green trees in the Background. Even at 720p@800kbps. Haven't noticed this with other hevc encodes at similar bitrates. https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/
- clouddrover 9y agoBitmovin's comparison: https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/ https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/ MSU's comparison from a couple of months ago: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/AV1-Beats-VP9-and-HEVC-on-Quality-if-Youve-Got-Time-says-Moscow-State-122945.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New... The x265 guys complained about the recent MSU test: http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented-msus-2017-codec-comparison/ http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented-msus-2017-c...
- robert_foss 9y agoJudging a codec by any one single frame isn't really good enough. The samples _and_ performance metrics used have to be quite varied.
- fwip 9y agoThat is a really weird distortion effect. I don't know if I would have noticed without you pointing it out, but it almost made me feel seasick.
- TD-Linux 9y agoActually had to double check this to make sure it wasn't in the sources. It seems the the encoder basically sees the trees as only having a small difference, but really visually it's quite large. The solution is a better distortion function in the encoder - libaom's is simple but dumb. (luckily this means no decoder or format changes)
- twotwotwo 9y agoOne thing I'd love to see follow from this is an image format based on its intra coding. The companies involved expressed interest (https://www.cnet.com/news/google-mozilla-av1-photo-format-could-outdo-aging-jpeg/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-mozilla-av1-photo-format-co...), and tests (https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/av1stilldemo/ https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/av1stilldemo/) look great. The .heic format now used by iPhones is the same idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...). But wider use of that is going to be constrained by the cost problem HEVC has in general (two patent pools to deal with). Some of WebP is based on VP8 (not VP9) intra coding too. There are a lot of tools packed in AV1's intra coding (and HEVC's, though I've read less about that). Block sizes range from 4x4 to 64x64 and there's a mix within one image, so the encoder can use the right size for the level of detail in each area. There are more ways to predict a block's content from what's to the top and left, which leaves less work for the JPEGish DCT part. There's clever de-ringing post-processing that, in effect, blurs away many of the attention-getting JPEG-y DCT artifacts around edges, while 1) being aware of the direction of the main edge itself to avoid blurring that away and 2) using contrast thresholds to preserve as much other legitimate detail as it can--more about deringing at https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/deringing_demo/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/deringing_demo/ . (There's some good detailed discussion at https://parisvideotech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/AOM-AV1-Video-Tech-meet-up.pdf https://parisvideotech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/AOM-AV... and in Wikipedia's page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 ) Relatedly, given the complexity, I wouldn't expect this to, like, take the world by storm in the next three months. The unoptimized encoder is still _really_ slow. Google has designed a hardware implementation, but of course hardware designs take time to get integrated, fabbed, and into shipping products. Given who's involved, I'm hopeful it does get wide support. (Would love to hear Apple's plans given their current support for x265; their decision to join AOMedia is a good sign at least.) Anyway, looking forward to seeing the results.
- futurix 9y agoGood image formats for movie frames aren't necessarily good for stand-alone still images though...
- ahartmetz 9y agoWhat is missing in the announcement is a link to a quality / bitrate comparison with perceptual quality. Netflix seems to have a good automated perceptual metric. PSNR is still a popular metric because it's "objective", but codecs optimized for PSNR produce ugly, blurry results, like all the VPx codecs. That said, a codec with great PSNR can probably be tuned for great perceptual results. The Vorbis people, who were involved in AV1, have produced some impressive perceptual improvements even with inferior technology (Ogg Theora, based on VP3.2), so they know what to do and how: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/theora/demo9.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/theora/demo9.html
- metajack 9y agoIt's not going to be decipherable without some help to point you to what to compare and how to read the charts, but https://arewecompressedyet.com/ https://arewecompressedyet.com/ contains many such comparisons and is what they use to evaluate branches and features, etc. The Daala team has mostly focused on four metrics, of which PSNR is just one and probably the least valued. PSNR-HVS-M is the "hardest" one, but it also includes SSIM and another SSIM variant. I'm sure one of the team will chime in shortly pointing to some recent results.
- clouddrover 9y agoMoscow State University's most recent codec comparison included subjective evaluations of image quality: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/AV1-Beats-VP9-and-HEVC-on-Quality-if-Youve-Got-Time-says-Moscow-State-122945.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New...
- ksec 9y agoIt is anywhere between 20% to 45% improvement depending on sources and metric used, at the cost of 100s to 1000s time slower encoding speed. Note current encoder isn't optimized for speed yet.
- userbinator 9y agoOddly enough, the actual link to download the specification, reproduced below for your perusal, seems to link to outlook.com and includes a bunch of other interesting data: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Faomediacodec.github.io%2Fav1-spec%2Fav1-spec.pdf&data=04%7C01%7Cgfrost%40microsoft.com%7Cc01143f4353e426231d508d590e3a9c1%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C1%7C636574229902920663%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwifQ%3D%3D%7C-1&sdata=lLQibtMygoLH30UNXZcUZGAA1i%2FqNE%2Ff6fgotaX3uhI%3D&reserved=0 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%... The URL embedded within, however, is directly accessible: https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf Edit: I started reading the spec and found that the bulk of it it appears to be mostly fragments of de-semicolon'd C code and plenty of lookup tables; in other words, a lot of "how" but not much in the way of "why" or "what". There's a noticeable lack of diagrams as well --- IMHO very important for describing something as visual as a video codec. For comparison, I certainly found the H.264 spec to be much more understandable than this AV1 one.
- dirtbag 9y agoThat first link looks like it came from email that went through Office 365, probably copy pasted. We see the same in our Office 365 environment, links are re-written to redirect through outlook.com's safelinks service.