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AV1: A new general-purpose video codec

909 points by TD-Linux 8y ago

threeseed 8y ago
> The AV1 format is and will always be royalty-free Not sure how they can make this statement. VP8 was patent encumbered all over the place and eventually required licensing from MPEG-LA. Surely AV1 would be infringing on at least some of HEVC's expansive patent pool. Unless of course Google is willing to indemnify user's against patent infringement lawsuit. Which would be really big news.
- Thaxll 8y ago
  From wikipedia: AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), is an open, royalty-free video coding format designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It is being developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium of firms from the semiconductor industry, video on demand providers, and web browser developers, founded in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. All of that was covered in the article as well.
    - thiagocsf 8y ago
      In Reddit, these type of comments are usually upvoted to the top because most users don’t bother reading articles. My guess is that we have a fellow redditor here.
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    Guessing (maybe generously?) at OP's meaning, claims were made in the past about VP8 being royalty free etc, and that turned out to be wrong. It's not clear how much we can trust them this time around. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/-76781.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/-76781.aspx http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-patent-risk/ http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-p... http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over-vp8-google.html http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over... http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/next-patent-infringement-trial-over.html http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/next-patent-infringement-...
    - shmerl 8y ago
      All of those are quite old sources, and patent claims were refuted. Is there anything newer?
      - Twirrim 8y ago
        https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-and-mpeg-la-settle-long-running-vp8h-264-patent-dispute/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-and-mpeg-la-settle-long... So far as I can see, that's the final state. Google ended up having to get a license from the MPEG-LA VP8 patent pool.
        magicalist 8y ago
        from your link: > Google's Serge Lachapelle notes that today's agreement is "not an acknowledgment" that VP8 infringes on any of the patents claimed by MPEG LA https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg06631.html https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg0663...
        shmerl 8y ago
        Bad for Google, but it's not a proof that they require a license. The court didn't rule on it, so it just shows that they didn't want to fight the troll further.
    - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
      There is nothing in there that asserts your claim about VP8 being encumbered by royalties/patents.
- pavlov 8y ago
  Apparently Google does IP diligence for AV1 to navigate around patents. Matt Frost of Google is quoted as saying: "Obviously, if we have an open source codec, we need to take very strong steps, and be very diligent in making sure that we are in fact producing something that's royalty free. So we have an extensive IP diligence process which involves diligence on both the contributor level – so when Google proposes a tool, we are doing our in-house IP diligence, using our in-house patent assets and outside advisors – that is then forwarded to the group, and is then again reviewed by an outside counsel that is engaged by the alliance. So that's a step that actually slows down innovation, but is obviously necessary to produce something that is open source and royalty free." The original source is a video, but this quote transcript is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note-frost-sme2017-16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note-frost-sme2017-16
  - mtkd 8y ago
    How did we end up at this point? It's like a self-enforced ceiling on evolution of technology. The tar pit gets more tarry every year.
    - pavlov 8y ago
      Fortunately patents are fairly short-lived (at least compared to copyright). A lot of the worst software patents were granted in the '90s and early 2000s and are reaching their 20-year expiration date.
      - zip1234 8y ago
        Have a look at recent patents for Facebook. http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php A patent for 'user status update suggestions' for example. Yuck.
      - kelnos 8y ago
        Does this actually help that much, though? I imagine many of the important patentable improvements end up being obsolete by the time the patents expire.
- shmerl 8y ago
  When did VP8 require licensing?
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  Why should Google indemnify users when MPEG-LA isn't willing to do so for their licensees? (see the mess that HEVC is in now, or even good old MP3 with Sisvel)
- magicalist 8y ago
  > VP8 was patent encumbered all over the place Was it? Can you name a single patent? MPEG-LA never did. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/google-mpeg-la-agree-to-royalty-free-terms-for-vp8-video-codec/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/googl...
  - xroche 8y ago
    > MPEG-LA never did The never do. It's like the mob: "pay us or you'll be in trouble". You can either pay the MPEGLA (and by the way, you will never know who inside the MPEGLA decided to sue you), or face consequences (and discover which patents are supposedly infringed)
- stepik777 8y ago
  > Surely AV1 would be infringing on at least some of HEVC's expansive patent pool Yes, it probably would, but if these patents are owned by members of AOM it is not an issue
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 8y ago
Site seems to be down. Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
vanderZwan 8y ago
This made me realise how much I enjoyed and have missed the Daala blog updates :) Any idea how many more articles are planned, so that can adjust my expectations a bit?
- xiphmont 8y ago
  The next two will be on the Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter and the Daala Entropy Coder, which AV1 adopted as it EC system. Beyond that, there will be several more though I've not yet planned out a specific order.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    Thanks, looking forward to them! Can we somehow convince you to part-time more technical blogs and videos? Like others here said, you have a knack for writing really accessible technical articles without them feeling dumbed down. I don't know if you're just more into doing the hands-on work of developing the codec (I can imagine that's exciting), or if it's a question of technically not being hired to do that. In the latter case, maybe "The People" could vote with their wallet to convince the higher-ups otherwise? Like, Ubuntu lets us decide what we want them to spend our donations on. If we had that with xiph.org and it had a section that said "more technical blogs!", or maybe even something like patreon a set-up where you can pledge to automated repeat donations for each blog entries, wouldn't be surprised if there were enough nerds willing to send donations specifically to justify to the managers that you may spend more time on outreach.
baxuz 8y ago
What does this mean for hardware accellerated decoding? Intel implemented VP9/h265 decoding in its processors just recently.
- cbhl 8y ago
  Same as when every new format comes out -- give a few years for the hardware folks to iterate on the hardware.
  - awill 8y ago
    Upon purchasing On2, It was Google's intention to release a new codec every 18-24 months or so. That would mean hardware would never catch up. However, Google didn't keep that pace. VP8 came out in 2010 and VP9 was 2013. AV1 was just released now. I would estimate that high end hardware launching in 2020 will have hardware decoding support for AV1. If AV2 doesn't launch until at least 2022, we'll have 2 good years :).
    - baxuz 8y ago
      Can't wait to have my laptop dropping frames while running at 90°
    - cbhl 8y ago
      I believe Google has hired quite a few hardware engineers since 2010. :)
      - awill 8y ago
        I bet. I believe Google offers reference implementations for free, but it's up to each hardware company (Nvidia, ARM, Intel etc..) to release a chip with hardware decoding enabled. Google can't do it for them.
- Reason077 8y ago
  Considering Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Apple, and other hardware companies are all members of the Alliance for Open Media - which is the consortium behind AV1 - I'd expect that work to support it in hardware is already well underway. https://aomedia.org https://aomedia.org
IshKebab 8y ago
> AV1 leapfrogs the performance of VP9 and HEVC Does anyone have any evidence of this claim?
- shmerl 8y ago
  For decoders. Encoder now is very very slow.
  - Numberwang 8y ago
    So not a good format for live streaming then?
    - Jhsto 8y ago
      The project is still underway, but I think decoding is more important than encoding, especially with live streams. Given a Twitch stream, for example, the encoding is only done by one peer while the decoding is done by thousands or (as of recent) millions.
      - vanderZwan 8y ago
        Counter-argument: encoding is the bottleneck in live-streaming
        nerdymanchild 8y ago
        Depends on how parallelizable the encoding algorithm is.
        simcop2387 8y ago
        With a live stream, it's generally not parallelizable at all. You won't have future frames to work with unless you add a huge delay in the stream, which generally doesn't mesh well with doing something live.
jhaile 8y ago
AV1 is a poor name for a video codec because it is too easy to visually confuse with AVI.
- jhaile 8y ago
  At first I thought this was a late April Fool's prank. The next headline might be a new FOSS font called C0mic S4ns.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    No need for that now that we have Comic Sans Neue: http://www.comicneue.com/ http://www.comicneue.com/ (FOSS-licensed)
    - Bromskloss 8y ago
      Now the FOSS people have something to laugh at too!
- edflsafoiewq 8y ago
  Not just visually. For a long time, googling for "AV1" would produce mostly results about AVI.
- xiphmont 8y ago
  I know how you feel. But they didn't like my suggestion of "Deep Space VP9".
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    what about .. av2
    - yulaow 8y ago
      it's "windows 8 to windows 10" problem again.
shmerl 8y ago
Is Daala development abandoned now?
- wyoh 8y ago
  They said a while ago they will be using Daala as a developmental testbed.
  - xiphmont 8y ago
    Yes. We still have internal investment is many pieces of Daala that didn't get adopted in AV1. I don't know the liklihood that Daala will rise again as a standalone codec project... possible, wouldn't bet on it.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      That's a pity, it was very promising, but if I remember correctly it hit some major blockers that weren't solved yet?
      - derf_ 8y ago
        See also my previous statement on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599601
    - ksec 8y ago
      I would much rather Daala live on as AV2.
      - xiphmont 8y ago
        I would too. We'll see what the future holds.
ct0 8y ago
Congratulations Chris!
martinald 8y ago
How much more effective is this than HEVC/x265 (especially at 4K HDR) resolutions?
- kvz 8y ago
  30% smaller than h26_4_ is an often heard statement. If you know how much more efficient h265 is in comparison with h264 you can do the math :) At transloadit we’ve been testing the reference implementation but to encode a video it’s about 20x slower than h264 still :) there will be many improvements to speed up but it’s expected to remain a lot slower (up to 4x as slow) or so I’ve read.
  - martinald 8y ago
    h26_4_? What do the underscores mean (excuse my ignorance).
    - Nadya 8y ago
      Probably meant to emphasize the 4 instead of h265 (since the parent they responded to mentioned h265 not h264) but used markdown instead of HN formatting so instead of 4 got _4_.
      - Bromskloss 8y ago
        Taking part in the campaign to make Hacker News recognise underscores as the way to do italics. That's what you would do on a typewriter to indicate to the typesetter that something should be set in italics.
    - colechristensen 8y ago
      Just emphasizing the 4. In markdown that would put the 4 in italics, where it's not supposed it still works as emphasis, but can be a bit confusing.
    - spiznnx 8y ago
      Pseudo-formatting for emphasis. If the page was markdown it would be bold/italicized.
NKosmatos 8y ago
Mandatory xkcd comic strip ;-) https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
agumonkey 8y ago
You know I just watched an old (and much degraded) VHS of a TV broadcast of the 80s superman. I missed zero HD 4K whatever. Something about the medium and the message here.
- __david__ 8y ago
  Well I recently watched an old laserdisc rip of star wars and I found it so terrible that I stopped watching. To each his own, but I for one welcome high quality codecs.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  I could survive just fine without glasses. That doesn't make it noble to do so.
lanius 8y ago
I am always blown away when reading about codecs. Video compression seems to be the perfect intersection of math, programming, and psychology.
- 21 8y ago
  And money. This is what happens when a lot of money is thrown at a problem.
  - mrits 8y ago
    This is what CAN happen when a lot of money is thrown at a problem.
    - matthew349hall 8y ago
      Important Distinction
  - danbmil99 8y ago
    For the record. Yes, a lot of money was spent developing this codec. However, a lot of creativity and risk-taking was involved as well. It was far from clear 15 years ago when xiph released Theora (aka vp3, ancestor of av1) that going up against mighty MPEG, with their enormous war chest from a decade of royalties, and dozens of patents (and the money to defend them) that success in the end was even possible much less assured. It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.
    - CharlesW 8y ago
      > It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model. 3-5 years will tell whether it's a triumph or a tragedy. It's certainly not possible to know today. Fans were quite sure Beta meant the end of VHS, but there are so many other (more important, in many cases) factors than the technology.
      - 8y ago
joemi 8y ago
That was a pretty nice write up about it. I don't know very much about video encoding, and usually when I've tried reading about it I very quickly am out of my depth, but this bit seemed pretty reader friendly to a not-even-close-to-an-expert like myself. How did it read for those who actually know about video encoding?
- teraflop 8y ago
  I'm no video codec expert either, but the author of this article, "Monty" Montgomery, has a real gift for technical explanation. ' Here's a video he created a few years ago, taking apart some popular misconceptions about how digital audio works: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
  - hanklazard 8y ago
    I knew I recognized his name! That digital audio video (series?) was so fantastic and I loved the hardware setups that he used to make his points.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    >> Monty" Montgomery, has a real gift for technical explanation. He does. I love his posts. Some say you don't really understand something until you can explain it to someone else. By that metric he's probably in the top 5 codec folks in the world today.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
      Some take it further and go "I want to really know this newfangled X stuff, gonna teach a class on it."
  - Bromskloss 8y ago
    What I appreciate most of all in that video is that he has carefully considered his words, not just to make a lay audience able to follow, but also so that what he says is _precisely_ correct.
  - 8y ago
throwaway84742 8y ago
Does anyone know when h264 goes patent-free? It’s truly ubiquitous, and it first came out in around 2003. It’ll be very exciting when it becomes totally libre.
- itakedrugs 8y ago
  Hopefully it will go the way copyrights are going and never be patent-free... /s
- yuhong 8y ago
  Probably 2020 or later.
- ksec 8y ago
  That is actually a good question. Mp3 is now patents free as well.
  - throwaway84742 8y ago
    And both standards are “good enough” for most use cases and are supported by an overwhelming majority of hardware devices. Once h264 goes off patent, the interest in more advanced formats will dwindle.
    - ksec 8y ago
      It will be good enough, for things like Gif replacement. For Video though I think we still have long way to go.
      - ksec 8y ago
        Or once all the AVC patents expire, what additional tools, like new encoding and tools from Open Sources like Daala we could add to, to form a new baseline codec for the web, that is truly Patents free. The current AV1 is only royalty free. When will all AAC patents expire? It is over 20 years since AAC introduction.
- 8y ago
Dowwie 8y ago
Where's the demo? It's not unreasonable to expect to see an actual video if the article is about a next generation video.
- puzzlingcaptcha 8y ago
  This has been available for a while: https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ (although might not be up to spec which was published only recently: https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-video-innovation-era-with-av1-release/ https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-v... )
- mkl 8y ago
  How would we play it? The only decoders that exist are experiments or tests, and they are not currently optimised enough for mainstream use.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    You can simply reencode the result of a low bitrate test using high bitrate H.264. It would take more bandwidth of course but the visual result would be more or less the same.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    Also a webassembly decoder could probably do short clips.
    - mkl 8y ago
      No one has yet written a good performant decoder for native, let alone Wasm. I don't dispute that it is theoretically possible - of course it is, people are making this codec for actual use, and I'm looking forward to it - just that it doesn't seem doable right now.
AceJohnny2 8y ago
The post doesn't mention hardware or silicon implementations. That's a key requirement for modern market adoption: if a mobile device can't hardware-decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker. I know Google provided a free hardware decode block for VP8, and I assume also for VP9 (since there appears to have been some, though not universal, hardware acceleration for that according the the Wikipedia article). I'm hoping they'll soon (or already) have the same for VP1. I see Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Allegro, AMD, and a bunch of other silicon vendors are also members of the Alliance for Open Media, so I expect to see hardware acceleration within the next 2-3 years. I'll be impressed if it's earlier. Edit: maybe hardware acceleration earlier. If the standard was released recently with the collaboration of the silicon industry, it's likely the current in-design/early-production silicon already has an implementation of the important parts of the codec, so we can expect consumer products with at least partial acceleration within 6 months.
- djrogers 8y ago
  > if a mobile device can't hardware-decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker. A mobile device needs to be able to hardware-encode it as well - countless hours of 4k/60 video are taken on phones.
  - mistercow 8y ago
    I'm not sure that you need mobile hardware encoding to drive initial adoption. As long as streaming services and the like can start using it to save bandwidth, you have a clear win for a big segment of the market. Older codecs can serve just fine for mobile encoding until the hardware catches up. But if most existing phones can't decode it efficiently, it's going to be pretty stuck until that situation changes.
    - thomastjeffery 8y ago
      I'd argue that it's more important to get encoders working, since re-encoding lossy->lossy is always a bad idea.
Boxxed 8y ago
Everyone here is asking about hardware encoding/decoding, which is obviously important. My question is, at what level do these encoders work at? Are they basically specialized SIMD instructions, or are they fully featured chips that take raw data as input and produce byte streams in the format of the protocol? Or somewhere in between?
- niftich 8y ago
  Typically it's a dedicated hardware block on the die of a larger chip, like AMD's UVD [1] and VCE [2] inside their GPU/APUs, or Nvidia's PureVideo [3] and NVENC [4]. Sometimes the line is even blurrier, like the Broadcom SOC in the Raspberry Pi, where various more general-purpose processors can work together to decode [5]. Then you have APIs that try to disassemble all the typical stages of video codec processing that applications can call and GPU drivers can implement, which serve as a bridge between hardware-assisted decode and application code. These are APIs like DXVA or one of the several in use with Linux [6]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC [5] https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv [6] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...
- theresistor 8y ago
  In between, but more like the latter conceptually. It’ll be a collection of bulk data processing blocks that are glued together by software. Generally, you want to implement the large bulk operations in HW, with SW handling all the option parsing and control logic.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago
    And this opens up the question of how easy it is to re-target exiting hardware to new techniques. For example, if I understand the Chroma-from-Luma prediction; then the maths involved is just 2-d linear regression (once for U vs. L once for V vs L.). That's a pretty generic task. Even when with the domain-specialisation that it is done over pixels in an encoding block, we are still talking about concepts common to all codecs. So maybe there existing acceleration hardware can already do it. But even if it can, the require primitive needs to be exposed to software if new protocols are to benefit from it. So my question (and maybe Boxxed's too) is whether the hardware interface is low-level enough for such adaptability.
senatorobama 8y ago
Are you hiring?
stuckinarut 8y ago
every day I come on here and read about these groups of people who are smarter than me doing cooler things than I will ever get to do and I just want to give up.
audvergr 8y ago
Additional background testing and perspective can be found in the following sponsored industry article - note BitMovin and Harmonic are both discussing this at the ongoing NAB conference in Las Vegas - http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=124245&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StreamingMediaMagazine-FeaturedArticles+%28StreamingMedia.com%3A+Featured+Articles%29 http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Arti...

909 points by TD-Linux 8y ago

> The AV1 format is and will always be royalty-free Not sure how they can make this statement. VP8 was patent encumbered all over the place and eventually required licensing from MPEG-LA. Surely AV1 would be infringing on at least some of HEVC's expansive patent pool. Unless of course Google is willing to indemnify user's against patent infringement lawsuit. Which would be really big news.

Thaxll 8y ago
From wikipedia: AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), is an open, royalty-free video coding format designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It is being developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium of firms from the semiconductor industry, video on demand providers, and web browser developers, founded in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
- threeseed 8y ago
  Not sure what this comment is supposed to mean. All of that was covered in the article as well.
  - thiagocsf 8y ago
    In Reddit, these type of comments are usually upvoted to the top because most users don’t bother reading articles. My guess is that we have a fellow redditor here.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  Guessing (maybe generously?) at OP's meaning, claims were made in the past about VP8 being royalty free etc, and that turned out to be wrong. It's not clear how much we can trust them this time around. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/-76781.aspx http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/-76781.aspx http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-patent-risk/ http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-p... http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over-vp8-google.html http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over... http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/next-patent-infringement-trial-over.html http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/next-patent-infringement-...
  - shmerl 8y ago
    All of those are quite old sources, and patent claims were refuted. Is there anything newer?
    - Twirrim 8y ago
      https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-and-mpeg-la-settle-long-running-vp8h-264-patent-dispute/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-and-mpeg-la-settle-long... So far as I can see, that's the final state. Google ended up having to get a license from the MPEG-LA VP8 patent pool.
      - magicalist 8y ago
        from your link: > Google's Serge Lachapelle notes that today's agreement is "not an acknowledgment" that VP8 infringes on any of the patents claimed by MPEG LA https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg06631.html https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg0663...
      - shmerl 8y ago
        Bad for Google, but it's not a proof that they require a license. The court didn't rule on it, so it just shows that they didn't want to fight the troll further.
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    There is nothing in there that asserts your claim about VP8 being encumbered by royalties/patents.
pavlov 8y ago
Apparently Google does IP diligence for AV1 to navigate around patents. Matt Frost of Google is quoted as saying: "Obviously, if we have an open source codec, we need to take very strong steps, and be very diligent in making sure that we are in fact producing something that's royalty free. So we have an extensive IP diligence process which involves diligence on both the contributor level – so when Google proposes a tool, we are doing our in-house IP diligence, using our in-house patent assets and outside advisors – that is then forwarded to the group, and is then again reviewed by an outside counsel that is engaged by the alliance. So that's a step that actually slows down innovation, but is obviously necessary to produce something that is open source and royalty free." The original source is a video, but this quote transcript is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note-frost-sme2017-16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note-frost-sme2017-16
- mtkd 8y ago
  How did we end up at this point? It's like a self-enforced ceiling on evolution of technology. The tar pit gets more tarry every year.
  - pavlov 8y ago
    Fortunately patents are fairly short-lived (at least compared to copyright). A lot of the worst software patents were granted in the '90s and early 2000s and are reaching their 20-year expiration date.
    - zip1234 8y ago
      Have a look at recent patents for Facebook. http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php A patent for 'user status update suggestions' for example. Yuck.
    - kelnos 8y ago
      Does this actually help that much, though? I imagine many of the important patentable improvements end up being obsolete by the time the patents expire.
shmerl 8y ago
When did VP8 require licensing?
pgeorgi 8y ago
Why should Google indemnify users when MPEG-LA isn't willing to do so for their licensees? (see the mess that HEVC is in now, or even good old MP3 with Sisvel)
magicalist 8y ago
> VP8 was patent encumbered all over the place Was it? Can you name a single patent? MPEG-LA never did. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/google-mpeg-la-agree-to-royalty-free-terms-for-vp8-video-codec/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/googl...
- xroche 8y ago
  > MPEG-LA never did The never do. It's like the mob: "pay us or you'll be in trouble". You can either pay the MPEGLA (and by the way, you will never know who inside the MPEGLA decided to sue you), or face consequences (and discover which patents are supposedly infringed)
stepik777 8y ago
> Surely AV1 would be infringing on at least some of HEVC's expansive patent pool Yes, it probably would, but if these patents are owned by members of AOM it is not an issue

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Ajedi32 8y ago

Site seems to be down. Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

vanderZwan 8y ago

This made me realise how much I enjoyed and have missed the Daala blog updates :) Any idea how many more articles are planned, so that can adjust my expectations a bit?

xiphmont 8y ago
The next two will be on the Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter and the Daala Entropy Coder, which AV1 adopted as it EC system. Beyond that, there will be several more though I've not yet planned out a specific order.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  Thanks, looking forward to them! Can we somehow convince you to part-time more technical blogs and videos? Like others here said, you have a knack for writing really accessible technical articles without them feeling dumbed down. I don't know if you're just more into doing the hands-on work of developing the codec (I can imagine that's exciting), or if it's a question of technically not being hired to do that. In the latter case, maybe "The People" could vote with their wallet to convince the higher-ups otherwise? Like, Ubuntu lets us decide what we want them to spend our donations on. If we had that with xiph.org and it had a section that said "more technical blogs!", or maybe even something like patreon a set-up where you can pledge to automated repeat donations for each blog entries, wouldn't be surprised if there were enough nerds willing to send donations specifically to justify to the managers that you may spend more time on outreach.

baxuz 8y ago

What does this mean for hardware accellerated decoding? Intel implemented VP9/h265 decoding in its processors just recently.

cbhl 8y ago
Same as when every new format comes out -- give a few years for the hardware folks to iterate on the hardware.
- awill 8y ago
  Upon purchasing On2, It was Google's intention to release a new codec every 18-24 months or so. That would mean hardware would never catch up. However, Google didn't keep that pace. VP8 came out in 2010 and VP9 was 2013. AV1 was just released now. I would estimate that high end hardware launching in 2020 will have hardware decoding support for AV1. If AV2 doesn't launch until at least 2022, we'll have 2 good years :).
  - baxuz 8y ago
    Can't wait to have my laptop dropping frames while running at 90°
  - cbhl 8y ago
    I believe Google has hired quite a few hardware engineers since 2010. :)
    - awill 8y ago
      I bet. I believe Google offers reference implementations for free, but it's up to each hardware company (Nvidia, ARM, Intel etc..) to release a chip with hardware decoding enabled. Google can't do it for them.
Reason077 8y ago
Considering Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Apple, and other hardware companies are all members of the Alliance for Open Media - which is the consortium behind AV1 - I'd expect that work to support it in hardware is already well underway. https://aomedia.org https://aomedia.org

IshKebab 8y ago

> AV1 leapfrogs the performance of VP9 and HEVC Does anyone have any evidence of this claim?

shmerl 8y ago
For decoders. Encoder now is very very slow.
- Numberwang 8y ago
  So not a good format for live streaming then?
  - Jhsto 8y ago
    The project is still underway, but I think decoding is more important than encoding, especially with live streams. Given a Twitch stream, for example, the encoding is only done by one peer while the decoding is done by thousands or (as of recent) millions.
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      Counter-argument: encoding is the bottleneck in live-streaming
      - nerdymanchild 8y ago
        Depends on how parallelizable the encoding algorithm is.
        simcop2387 8y ago
        With a live stream, it's generally not parallelizable at all. You won't have future frames to work with unless you add a huge delay in the stream, which generally doesn't mesh well with doing something live.

jhaile 8y ago

AV1 is a poor name for a video codec because it is too easy to visually confuse with AVI.

jhaile 8y ago
At first I thought this was a late April Fool's prank. The next headline might be a new FOSS font called C0mic S4ns.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  No need for that now that we have Comic Sans Neue: http://www.comicneue.com/ http://www.comicneue.com/ (FOSS-licensed)
  - Bromskloss 8y ago
    Now the FOSS people have something to laugh at too!
edflsafoiewq 8y ago
Not just visually. For a long time, googling for "AV1" would produce mostly results about AVI.
xiphmont 8y ago
I know how you feel. But they didn't like my suggestion of "Deep Space VP9".
- agumonkey 8y ago
  what about .. av2
  - yulaow 8y ago
    it's "windows 8 to windows 10" problem again.

shmerl 8y ago

Is Daala development abandoned now?

wyoh 8y ago
They said a while ago they will be using Daala as a developmental testbed.
- xiphmont 8y ago
  Yes. We still have internal investment is many pieces of Daala that didn't get adopted in AV1. I don't know the liklihood that Daala will rise again as a standalone codec project... possible, wouldn't bet on it.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    That's a pity, it was very promising, but if I remember correctly it hit some major blockers that weren't solved yet?
    - derf_ 8y ago
      See also my previous statement on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599601
  - ksec 8y ago
    I would much rather Daala live on as AV2.
    - xiphmont 8y ago
      I would too. We'll see what the future holds.

ct0 8y ago

Congratulations Chris!

martinald 8y ago

How much more effective is this than HEVC/x265 (especially at 4K HDR) resolutions?

kvz 8y ago
30% smaller than h26_4_ is an often heard statement. If you know how much more efficient h265 is in comparison with h264 you can do the math :) At transloadit we’ve been testing the reference implementation but to encode a video it’s about 20x slower than h264 still :) there will be many improvements to speed up but it’s expected to remain a lot slower (up to 4x as slow) or so I’ve read.
- martinald 8y ago
  h26_4_? What do the underscores mean (excuse my ignorance).
  - Nadya 8y ago
    Probably meant to emphasize the 4 instead of h265 (since the parent they responded to mentioned h265 not h264) but used markdown instead of HN formatting so instead of 4 got _4_.
    - Bromskloss 8y ago
      Taking part in the campaign to make Hacker News recognise underscores as the way to do italics. That's what you would do on a typewriter to indicate to the typesetter that something should be set in italics.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    Just emphasizing the 4. In markdown that would put the 4 in italics, where it's not supposed it still works as emphasis, but can be a bit confusing.
  - spiznnx 8y ago
    Pseudo-formatting for emphasis. If the page was markdown it would be bold/italicized.

NKosmatos 8y ago

Mandatory xkcd comic strip ;-) https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

agumonkey 8y ago

You know I just watched an old (and much degraded) VHS of a TV broadcast of the 80s superman. I missed zero HD 4K whatever. Something about the medium and the message here.

__david__ 8y ago
Well I recently watched an old laserdisc rip of star wars and I found it so terrible that I stopped watching. To each his own, but I for one welcome high quality codecs.
Dylan16807 8y ago
I could survive just fine without glasses. That doesn't make it noble to do so.

lanius 8y ago

I am always blown away when reading about codecs. Video compression seems to be the perfect intersection of math, programming, and psychology.

21 8y ago
And money. This is what happens when a lot of money is thrown at a problem.
- mrits 8y ago
  This is what CAN happen when a lot of money is thrown at a problem.
  - matthew349hall 8y ago
    Important Distinction
- danbmil99 8y ago
  For the record. Yes, a lot of money was spent developing this codec. However, a lot of creativity and risk-taking was involved as well. It was far from clear 15 years ago when xiph released Theora (aka vp3, ancestor of av1) that going up against mighty MPEG, with their enormous war chest from a decade of royalties, and dozens of patents (and the money to defend them) that success in the end was even possible much less assured. It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    > It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model. 3-5 years will tell whether it's a triumph or a tragedy. It's certainly not possible to know today. Fans were quite sure Beta meant the end of VHS, but there are so many other (more important, in many cases) factors than the technology.
    - 8y ago

joemi 8y ago

That was a pretty nice write up about it. I don't know very much about video encoding, and usually when I've tried reading about it I very quickly am out of my depth, but this bit seemed pretty reader friendly to a not-even-close-to-an-expert like myself. How did it read for those who actually know about video encoding?

teraflop 8y ago
I'm no video codec expert either, but the author of this article, "Monty" Montgomery, has a real gift for technical explanation. ' Here's a video he created a few years ago, taking apart some popular misconceptions about how digital audio works: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
- hanklazard 8y ago
  I knew I recognized his name! That digital audio video (series?) was so fantastic and I loved the hardware setups that he used to make his points.
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> Monty" Montgomery, has a real gift for technical explanation. He does. I love his posts. Some say you don't really understand something until you can explain it to someone else. By that metric he's probably in the top 5 codec folks in the world today.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
    Some take it further and go "I want to really know this newfangled X stuff, gonna teach a class on it."
- Bromskloss 8y ago
  What I appreciate most of all in that video is that he has carefully considered his words, not just to make a lay audience able to follow, but also so that what he says is _precisely_ correct.
- 8y ago

throwaway84742 8y ago

Does anyone know when h264 goes patent-free? It’s truly ubiquitous, and it first came out in around 2003. It’ll be very exciting when it becomes totally libre.

itakedrugs 8y ago
Hopefully it will go the way copyrights are going and never be patent-free... /s
yuhong 8y ago
Probably 2020 or later.
ksec 8y ago
That is actually a good question. Mp3 is now patents free as well.
- throwaway84742 8y ago
  And both standards are “good enough” for most use cases and are supported by an overwhelming majority of hardware devices. Once h264 goes off patent, the interest in more advanced formats will dwindle.
  - ksec 8y ago
    It will be good enough, for things like Gif replacement. For Video though I think we still have long way to go.
    - ksec 8y ago
      Or once all the AVC patents expire, what additional tools, like new encoding and tools from Open Sources like Daala we could add to, to form a new baseline codec for the web, that is truly Patents free. The current AV1 is only royalty free. When will all AAC patents expire? It is over 20 years since AAC introduction.
8y ago

Dowwie 8y ago

Where's the demo? It's not unreasonable to expect to see an actual video if the article is about a next generation video.

puzzlingcaptcha 8y ago
This has been available for a while: https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ (although might not be up to spec which was published only recently: https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-video-innovation-era-with-av1-release/ https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-v... )
mkl 8y ago
How would we play it? The only decoders that exist are experiments or tests, and they are not currently optimised enough for mainstream use.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  You can simply reencode the result of a low bitrate test using high bitrate H.264. It would take more bandwidth of course but the visual result would be more or less the same.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Also a webassembly decoder could probably do short clips.
  - mkl 8y ago
    No one has yet written a good performant decoder for native, let alone Wasm. I don't dispute that it is theoretically possible - of course it is, people are making this codec for actual use, and I'm looking forward to it - just that it doesn't seem doable right now.

AceJohnny2 8y ago

The post doesn't mention hardware or silicon implementations. That's a key requirement for modern market adoption: if a mobile device can't hardware-decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker. I know Google provided a free hardware decode block for VP8, and I assume also for VP9 (since there appears to have been some, though not universal, hardware acceleration for that according the the Wikipedia article). I'm hoping they'll soon (or already) have the same for VP1. I see Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Allegro, AMD, and a bunch of other silicon vendors are also members of the Alliance for Open Media, so I expect to see hardware acceleration within the next 2-3 years. I'll be impressed if it's earlier. Edit: maybe hardware acceleration earlier. If the standard was released recently with the collaboration of the silicon industry, it's likely the current in-design/early-production silicon already has an implementation of the important parts of the codec, so we can expect consumer products with at least partial acceleration within 6 months.

djrogers 8y ago
> if a mobile device can't hardware-decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker. A mobile device needs to be able to hardware-encode it as well - countless hours of 4k/60 video are taken on phones.
- mistercow 8y ago
  I'm not sure that you need mobile hardware encoding to drive initial adoption. As long as streaming services and the like can start using it to save bandwidth, you have a clear win for a big segment of the market. Older codecs can serve just fine for mobile encoding until the hardware catches up. But if most existing phones can't decode it efficiently, it's going to be pretty stuck until that situation changes.
  - thomastjeffery 8y ago
    I'd argue that it's more important to get encoders working, since re-encoding lossy->lossy is always a bad idea.

Boxxed 8y ago

Everyone here is asking about hardware encoding/decoding, which is obviously important. My question is, at what level do these encoders work at? Are they basically specialized SIMD instructions, or are they fully featured chips that take raw data as input and produce byte streams in the format of the protocol? Or somewhere in between?

niftich 8y ago
Typically it's a dedicated hardware block on the die of a larger chip, like AMD's UVD [1] and VCE [2] inside their GPU/APUs, or Nvidia's PureVideo [3] and NVENC [4]. Sometimes the line is even blurrier, like the Broadcom SOC in the Raspberry Pi, where various more general-purpose processors can work together to decode [5]. Then you have APIs that try to disassemble all the typical stages of video codec processing that applications can call and GPU drivers can implement, which serve as a bridge between hardware-assisted decode and application code. These are APIs like DXVA or one of the several in use with Linux [6]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC [5] https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv [6] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...
theresistor 8y ago
In between, but more like the latter conceptually. It’ll be a collection of bulk data processing blocks that are glued together by software. Generally, you want to implement the large bulk operations in HW, with SW handling all the option parsing and control logic.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
  And this opens up the question of how easy it is to re-target exiting hardware to new techniques. For example, if I understand the Chroma-from-Luma prediction; then the maths involved is just 2-d linear regression (once for U vs. L once for V vs L.). That's a pretty generic task. Even when with the domain-specialisation that it is done over pixels in an encoding block, we are still talking about concepts common to all codecs. So maybe there existing acceleration hardware can already do it. But even if it can, the require primitive needs to be exposed to software if new protocols are to benefit from it. So my question (and maybe Boxxed's too) is whether the hardware interface is low-level enough for such adaptability.

senatorobama 8y ago

Are you hiring?

stuckinarut 8y ago

every day I come on here and read about these groups of people who are smarter than me doing cooler things than I will ever get to do and I just want to give up.

audvergr 8y ago

Additional background testing and perspective can be found in the following sponsored industry article - note BitMovin and Harmonic are both discussing this at the ongoing NAB conference in Las Vegas - http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=124245&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StreamingMediaMagazine-FeaturedArticles+%28StreamingMedia.com%3A+Featured+Articles%29 http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Arti...