10 ms·

>Company, which has every reason to exaggerate, claims it can improve encoding speed by 32.2% against x265 veryslow "It’ll be interesting to see if we find out

by motbob 7y ago

>Company, which has every reason to exaggerate, claims it can improve encoding speed by 32.2% against x265 veryslow "It’ll be interesting to see if we find out more info and are able to test this encoder in the coming months." >BBC, which has no skin in the game, claims AV1 is less efficient than HEVC "I would call this test flawed as AV1 has consistently shown to perform better than HEVC." Every article on AV1 that I have read is like this, except for https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-about-av1/ https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-abou... -- they are always blatantly cheerleading new advancements, like only being 5x slower to decode than VP9 or 10x slower to encode than x265 or whatever. But the advancements are not phrased like that, of course--you are never reminded that the competition continues to clobber AV1 in every aspect but filesize/quality efficiency.

Causality1 7y ago
Yeah. I can see HEVC and AV1 coexisting for a very long time. I don't see AV1 getting adopted for game streaming purposes, for instance. It'll make an excellent media archive format, but personally I'm still migrating my content from h.264 to HEVC and I don't really see myself bothering to do it all again for AV1.
- clouddrover 7y ago
  > I don't see AV1 getting adopted for game streaming purposes Twitch will be doing exactly that. They're using VP9 now: https://blog.twitch.tv/how-does-vp9-deliver-value-for-twitchs-esports-live-streaming-35db26f6322f https://blog.twitch.tv/how-does-vp9-deliver-value-for-twitch... They will be moving to AV1 in the future. They've contributed features to AV1 specifically for the low latency live streaming use case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5sJX6VA34o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5sJX6VA34o
  - chubs 7y ago
    Is it simply the case that once AV1 encoding gets done in hardware in most CPUs, all its disadvantages vanish and it becomes the obvious choice?
    - threeseed 7y ago
      Well AV1 encoding isn't hardware accelerated on iOS/MacOS devices but then again they probably aren't that big in the games streaming space.
clouddrover 7y ago
> the competition continues to clobber AV1 in every aspect Which competitor beats AV1 in licensing? VP9 matches it in licensing. No other codec beats it. Even Leonardo Chiariglione (founder and chairman of MPEG) says AV1's licensing has MPEG beat: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/ http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...
- icelancer 7y ago
  Right. AV1 is technically poor but the licensing is so egregious elsewhere that we should really be rooting on VP9/AV1 over the alternatives.
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    AV1/VP9 will not be anywhere near royalty-free when all is said and done. https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130840 https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
    - quink 7y ago
      HEVC Advance lists 681 US patents in their patent list. It is completely unlikely that AV1 infringes on none of them or any other patents. However, there's a big giant gap between a valid patent and actually expecting to get royalties without even revealing which patents are supposedly being infringed on even now that AV1 is standardised and in production usage. So do I think that AV1 is patent-free when all is said and done from a legal standpoint? No. Do I think it'll be royalty-free anyway? Yes. Also: > 1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee). vs. * JVC Kenwood Corporation * Koninklijke Philips N.V. * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Orange S.A. * Toshiba IPR Solutions, Inc. If they are intending to initiate any patent litigation (which is going to be a very long time yet not least of all because they won't even reveal which patents) I think they're going to be at a losing end very very quickly having waited this long for VP9/AV1 to establish themselves.
zbobet2012 7y ago
The BBC article _is_ extremely flawed. Namely BBC bench-marked using this methodology^: The parameter “--end-usage=q” was set to force fixed QP encoding according to the QPs in Table 1 and “--threads=1” was used to run the encoder in single-thread mode. The parameters “--passes=1” and “--lag-in-frames=0” were set to run AV1 in single pass mode without the possibility of looking ahead in the video sequence before encoding. Finally, the internal bit depth of the codec was set to 12 as typically used during the AV1 development. Finally, for all encoding technologies, each sequence was split into chunks of one Intra period (approximately 1 second, as defined in the RA configuration for HM and JEM), which allowed each chunk to be independently encoded in parallel. This coding configuration was adopted to reduce the overall time needed to encode with AV1, intead of encoding each 10 second sequence sequentially. The BBC essentially forced the GOP size to 1s for libaom. In every benchmark I've run where HM and libaom are _not_ run in ridiculous modes, libaom has been about 30% better bdrate. This is consistent with many, broadly reported, independent analysis such as MSU, Facebook, etc. The second BBC evaluation which at least enabled two pass (the configuration AOM was developed in) shows much larger gains^^. They still did not address the inequity in gop length. Even old codecs like h264 can see a 10 to 20% gain on sequences from longer GOPs. AV1 is far from perfect, as some of it's features are very computationally complex to implement today, while HEVC and VVC have "better known" complexity for their features. But the BBC benchmark analysis is simply not accurate. ^ https://zenodo.org/record/1494930#.XP7hdFVKgQ8 https://zenodo.org/record/1494930#.XP7hdFVKgQ8 ^^ https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2019-05-av1-codec-streaming-processing-hevc-vvc https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2019-05-av1-codec-streaming-pr... Comparisons: http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/ http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/ https://code.fb.com/video-engineering/facebook-video-adds-av1-support/ https://code.fb.com/video-engineering/facebook-video-adds-av... https://www.elecard.com/page/aom_av1_vs_hevc https://www.elecard.com/page/aom_av1_vs_hevc http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/spie-2017.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/spie-2017.pdf https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/ https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/ Edit: PS. The BBC evaluation is good for what they where benchmarking. Will AV1 today beat HM for live streaming? And the answer is, no. The Intel SVT encoder may change that soon. Libaom was not configured, or tested for that. But this is an odd benchmark to put forward as explicitly mentioned, speed is not what _either_ code base was built for.
jupp0r 7y ago
> you are never reminded that the competition continues to clobber AV1 in every aspect but filesize/quality efficiency You could have made that statement for all previous codec generations as well. We always buy comparatively small improvements with much higher computational costs. And Moore's law makes it always worth it. In the end filesize/efficiency is why we are doing this stuff in the first place.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
It's slightly obscure, but I think the BBC concluded that AV1 was better than x265. They ran a similar comparison before and published more details. In that one, AV1 lost a little bit to x265 on objective PSNR but beat it on subjective evaluation. In this latest result, they don't give as much info, but AV1 is closer in PSNR (ahead for 4k) while also being 25x faster than it was the last time, so presumably it would still win on subjective quality.
microcolonel 7y ago
> BBC, which has no skin in the game, claims AV1 is less efficient than HEVC The BBC does have skin in the game. They have many people in house who have invested in HEVC, and put their names behind that decision; furthermore, maybe you'll remember when the BBC spent a huge amount of money on Dirac, which seems to have continued to be extremely impractical in the medium to long term. Maybe the BBC doesn't have a spectacular track record for picking the winners in the video codec game. ;- ) Added: The BBC's comparison also seems to be between professionally-configured and tuned HEVC/VVC encoders, supported by their vendors; and what seems to be a default-configured libaom, with no consultation with the vendor.
- derf_ 7y ago
  To be fair, BBC's sole reason for investing in Dirac (to my understanding) was to fit HD quality video into the pipes for an SD production system. As far as I know, it satisfied that purpose for them, so the project can be considered a success from that standpoint.
xvilka 7y ago
The whole patent system for audio and video storage is flawed. These "competitors" should be abolished completely.
unlord 7y ago
> It’ll be interesting to see if we find out more info and are able to test this encoder in the coming months. You won't have to wait long, more information will be coming out later this month. I manage the codec engineering team at Mozilla and we are co-hosting the Big Apple Video 2019 conference with Vimeo at their space on June 26th: https://bigapple.video https://bigapple.video https://twitter.com/bigapplevideo https://twitter.com/bigapplevideo Have a look at our speaker list. Zoe Liu, the Co-Founder and President of Visionular, will be presenting the Aurora AV1 encoder, but this is just one of many talks that will look at the state-of-the-art in video technology. Hassene Tmar of Intel will give an overview of SVT-AV1. The conference is free to attend, but please register. We will be live streaming the event with remote participation for those who can't make it.
ksec 7y ago
Thanks for the link. For some reason my RSS reader ( likely in the Google Reader transition ) lost Kostya's feed. He used to be the one implementing all these obscure video codec. And the article summarise nicely everything I loathe about AV1 and Baidu. I could only wish VVC or EVC fix what problem we have, or if not let hope they do better with AV2. P.S - I am still not convinced Apple is fully on board with Open Media Alliance.

by motbob 7y ago

Causality1 7y ago

Yeah. I can see HEVC and AV1 coexisting for a very long time. I don't see AV1 getting adopted for game streaming purposes, for instance. It'll make an excellent media archive format, but personally I'm still migrating my content from h.264 to HEVC and I don't really see myself bothering to do it all again for AV1.

clouddrover 7y ago
> I don't see AV1 getting adopted for game streaming purposes Twitch will be doing exactly that. They're using VP9 now: https://blog.twitch.tv/how-does-vp9-deliver-value-for-twitchs-esports-live-streaming-35db26f6322f https://blog.twitch.tv/how-does-vp9-deliver-value-for-twitch... They will be moving to AV1 in the future. They've contributed features to AV1 specifically for the low latency live streaming use case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5sJX6VA34o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5sJX6VA34o
- chubs 7y ago
  Is it simply the case that once AV1 encoding gets done in hardware in most CPUs, all its disadvantages vanish and it becomes the obvious choice?
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Well AV1 encoding isn't hardware accelerated on iOS/MacOS devices but then again they probably aren't that big in the games streaming space.

clouddrover 7y ago

> the competition continues to clobber AV1 in every aspect Which competitor beats AV1 in licensing? VP9 matches it in licensing. No other codec beats it. Even Leonardo Chiariglione (founder and chairman of MPEG) says AV1's licensing has MPEG beat: http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/ http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...

icelancer 7y ago
Right. AV1 is technically poor but the licensing is so egregious elsewhere that we should really be rooting on VP9/AV1 over the alternatives.
- CharlesW 7y ago
  AV1/VP9 will not be anywhere near royalty-free when all is said and done. https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130840 https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
  - quink 7y ago
    HEVC Advance lists 681 US patents in their patent list. It is completely unlikely that AV1 infringes on none of them or any other patents. However, there's a big giant gap between a valid patent and actually expecting to get royalties without even revealing which patents are supposedly being infringed on even now that AV1 is standardised and in production usage. So do I think that AV1 is patent-free when all is said and done from a legal standpoint? No. Do I think it'll be royalty-free anyway? Yes. Also: > 1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee). vs. * JVC Kenwood Corporation * Koninklijke Philips N.V. * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Orange S.A. * Toshiba IPR Solutions, Inc. If they are intending to initiate any patent litigation (which is going to be a very long time yet not least of all because they won't even reveal which patents) I think they're going to be at a losing end very very quickly having waited this long for VP9/AV1 to establish themselves.

zbobet2012 7y ago

The BBC article _is_ extremely flawed. Namely BBC bench-marked using this methodology^: The parameter “--end-usage=q” was set to force fixed QP encoding according to the QPs in Table 1 and “--threads=1” was used to run the encoder in single-thread mode. The parameters “--passes=1” and “--lag-in-frames=0” were set to run AV1 in single pass mode without the possibility of looking ahead in the video sequence before encoding. Finally, the internal bit depth of the codec was set to 12 as typically used during the AV1 development. Finally, for all encoding technologies, each sequence was split into chunks of one Intra period (approximately 1 second, as defined in the RA configuration for HM and JEM), which allowed each chunk to be independently encoded in parallel. This coding configuration was adopted to reduce the overall time needed to encode with AV1, intead of encoding each 10 second sequence sequentially. The BBC essentially forced the GOP size to 1s for libaom. In every benchmark I've run where HM and libaom are _not_ run in ridiculous modes, libaom has been about 30% better bdrate. This is consistent with many, broadly reported, independent analysis such as MSU, Facebook, etc. The second BBC evaluation which at least enabled two pass (the configuration AOM was developed in) shows much larger gains^^. They still did not address the inequity in gop length. Even old codecs like h264 can see a 10 to 20% gain on sequences from longer GOPs. AV1 is far from perfect, as some of it's features are very computationally complex to implement today, while HEVC and VVC have "better known" complexity for their features. But the BBC benchmark analysis is simply not accurate. ^ https://zenodo.org/record/1494930#.XP7hdFVKgQ8 https://zenodo.org/record/1494930#.XP7hdFVKgQ8 ^^ https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2019-05-av1-codec-streaming-processing-hevc-vvc https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2019-05-av1-codec-streaming-pr... Comparisons: http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/ http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/ https://code.fb.com/video-engineering/facebook-video-adds-av1-support/ https://code.fb.com/video-engineering/facebook-video-adds-av... https://www.elecard.com/page/aom_av1_vs_hevc https://www.elecard.com/page/aom_av1_vs_hevc http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/spie-2017.pdf http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/spie-2017.pdf https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/ https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/ Edit: PS. The BBC evaluation is good for what they where benchmarking. Will AV1 today beat HM for live streaming? And the answer is, no. The Intel SVT encoder may change that soon. Libaom was not configured, or tested for that. But this is an odd benchmark to put forward as explicitly mentioned, speed is not what _either_ code base was built for.

jupp0r 7y ago

> you are never reminded that the competition continues to clobber AV1 in every aspect but filesize/quality efficiency You could have made that statement for all previous codec generations as well. We always buy comparatively small improvements with much higher computational costs. And Moore's law makes it always worth it. In the end filesize/efficiency is why we are doing this stuff in the first place.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

It's slightly obscure, but I think the BBC concluded that AV1 was better than x265. They ran a similar comparison before and published more details. In that one, AV1 lost a little bit to x265 on objective PSNR but beat it on subjective evaluation. In this latest result, they don't give as much info, but AV1 is closer in PSNR (ahead for 4k) while also being 25x faster than it was the last time, so presumably it would still win on subjective quality.

microcolonel 7y ago

> BBC, which has no skin in the game, claims AV1 is less efficient than HEVC The BBC does have skin in the game. They have many people in house who have invested in HEVC, and put their names behind that decision; furthermore, maybe you'll remember when the BBC spent a huge amount of money on Dirac, which seems to have continued to be extremely impractical in the medium to long term. Maybe the BBC doesn't have a spectacular track record for picking the winners in the video codec game. ;- ) Added: The BBC's comparison also seems to be between professionally-configured and tuned HEVC/VVC encoders, supported by their vendors; and what seems to be a default-configured libaom, with no consultation with the vendor.

derf_ 7y ago
To be fair, BBC's sole reason for investing in Dirac (to my understanding) was to fit HD quality video into the pipes for an SD production system. As far as I know, it satisfied that purpose for them, so the project can be considered a success from that standpoint.

xvilka 7y ago

The whole patent system for audio and video storage is flawed. These "competitors" should be abolished completely.

unlord 7y ago

> It’ll be interesting to see if we find out more info and are able to test this encoder in the coming months. You won't have to wait long, more information will be coming out later this month. I manage the codec engineering team at Mozilla and we are co-hosting the Big Apple Video 2019 conference with Vimeo at their space on June 26th: https://bigapple.video https://bigapple.video https://twitter.com/bigapplevideo https://twitter.com/bigapplevideo Have a look at our speaker list. Zoe Liu, the Co-Founder and President of Visionular, will be presenting the Aurora AV1 encoder, but this is just one of many talks that will look at the state-of-the-art in video technology. Hassene Tmar of Intel will give an overview of SVT-AV1. The conference is free to attend, but please register. We will be live streaming the event with remote participation for those who can't make it.

ksec 7y ago

Thanks for the link. For some reason my RSS reader ( likely in the Google Reader transition ) lost Kostya's feed. He used to be the one implementing all these obscure video codec. And the article summarise nicely everything I loathe about AV1 and Baidu. I could only wish VVC or EVC fix what problem we have, or if not let hope they do better with AV2. P.S - I am still not convinced Apple is fully on board with Open Media Alliance.