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Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android
- jl6 7y agoA 20% data saving but how much extra battery usage for devices which don’t have hardware decoding for AV1 (which last time I checked was all of them)?
- xxpor 7y agoDo phones have HW support for VP9? edit: looks like it, at least for recent snapdragon phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations
- Grazester 7y agoDo 2+ plus year old phones count as recent?
- gruez 7y agoFrom the link, Snapdragon 820: launched early 2016 Snapdragon 660: announced on May 9, 2017 Not saying that all phones made after 2017 will have it, but there are mid range phones on sale that do.
- Uhhrrr 7y agoI see a question mark next to the 660 on the Wikipedia page. Is there some indication of that date from elsewhere?
- ksec 7y agoExactly. I am thinking if this is going to be some sort of play against VVC. Or will Youtube and Netflix force AV1 upon everyone where if you want high quality HDR or 4K Content you will require AV1.
- jhasse 7y ago> Or will Youtube and Netflix force AV1 upon everyone where if you want high quality HDR or 4K Content you will require AV1. I sure hope so!
- izacus 7y agoOn YouTube you already need a device that supports VP9.2 to get HDR. And there's a huge amount of HDR TVs/STBs (including Sony and the flagship Shield TV) which don't get HDR YouTube because they only support base VP9 and H.265.
- mikenew 7y agoI sure hope it's a war on VVC. I don't know why anyone would want a patent encumbered pay-to-use video codec over an open free one unless you're a stakeholder.
- becauseiam 7y agoThe real question is how the rest of the market will respond to EVC, not necessarily VVC.
- ksec 7y agoAs far as I can tell, I dont see EVC being in the race. Its free profile is barely any better than H.264, while its pay profile is no where near VVC.
- cbhl 7y agoWhich is why they launched it behind an opt-in checkbox. New codecs are always chicken-and-egg -- you need to have content available before the hardware encoders/decoder silicon gets produced and then trickles down to the phones.
- ryantriangles 7y agoNot all of them, hardware AV1 has been rolling out over the last year. LG include hardware AV1 decoding in two of their TV lines now (OLED ZX and NanoCell). MediaTek's new SOCs include it, and they're being used in Xiaomi, Nokia, and Motorola phones this year. Amlogic's TV and set-top box SOCs, used in things like the Amazon Fire TV as well as Android smart TVs and dedicated media players, include it. Realtek's TV SOC with hardware AV1 support ships "early 2020." Hardware AV1 decoding is available on some Android devices right now, and will ship with a lot more over the course of the year. So it seems the perfect time to ship an AV1 option behind an opt-in setting, which is what they've done. If you don't have hardware support and it's not worth the battery drain then you don't have to select it and there's no way they're removing H.264 support anytime soon.
- alias_neo 7y agoHopefully the open/free nature means it'll be cheaper to integrate into lower end ARM IPs so that is not just the flagship Snapdragon and Exynos chips that offer AV1 Getting it into the hands of the top 5 Samsung devices would probably cover a significant market share (not to mention getting it into all Apple phones/tablets).
- ksec 7y ago>it'll be cheaper to integrate into It is not like the hardware part of the die is free. AV1 has comparatively higher decoding requirement even in hardware.
- alias_neo 7y agoIndeed. I imagine some older codecs could be dropped though, and the cost saved on IP should offset it. I'm not sure what the comparative silicon size might be though so I can't speculate.
- jl6 7y agoEdit: to clarify, this is not a rhetorical question - I would like to know so that I and other end users can make an informed choice about whether to opt in to this or not.
- ksec 7y agoIf you are on battery devices, you either do it in Hardware or not watch it. Even Software H.264 decoding on most Android phone is quite taxing, as they are relatively weak in single core performance. The Energy saving from 20% bitrate in 4G transfer is going to be minimal comparatively speaking.
- apocalyptic0n3 7y agoNo word on what their encoding toolset is. That's been the limiting factor with widespread adoption thus far; it just takes too much CPU and too much time to encode as AV1 vs 264, 265, or VP9
- CharlesW 7y ago> No word on what their encoding toolset is. They're using ST-AV1[1], the encoder they've collaborated with Intel on.[2][3] [1] https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 [2] https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-netflix-deliver-av1-scalable-codec-power-next-gen-compression-tech-visual-workloads/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-netflix-deliver-av1-sc... [3] https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-svt-av1-a-scalable-open-source-av1-framework-c726cce3103a https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-svt-av1-a-scalable-o...
- ksec 7y agoSo SVT-AV1 now does 20% better than VP9? Edit: They did mention the 20% is from AV1-libaom compression efficiency as measured against VP9-libvpx. So not SVT-AV1.
- CharlesW 7y agoThey cite AV1-libaom for the 20% efficiency improvement over VP9, but I didn't take that to mean that they're using the reference encoder in production. Do you happen to know for sure?
- jjcm 7y agoFor Netflix this likely doesn't matter. While Youtube deals with 300+ hours of content uploaded every minute that it has to encode, Netflix only has to encode ~100 titles per month. Even if it takes a month to encode 1 of these, it's still easily doable for Netflix.
- apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
- shmerl 7y agoI assume they are using AV1+Opus? When are hardware decoders and encoders for AV1 coming for common GPUs (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc.?).
- solarkraft 7y agoHow is the hardware decoding story nowadays? Have devices with hardware decoders already started shipping?
- babypuncher 7y agoNewer Snapdragon SoCs, and that's about it right now.
- TheGoddessInari 7y agoOnly mediatek has a smartphone SOC with AV1 available.
- chubs 7y agoBroadcom seems to have a hardware decoder ready now: https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/09/25/broadcom-bcm7218x-stb-soc-av1-hardware-decoding-wifi-6/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/09/25/broadcom-bcm7218x-st...
- Jonnax 7y agoHow much slower are encodes vs H.264 or HEVC? The way some of the comments here are talking about it. It's like it requires a 2 hour encode to encode 1 hour. For Netflix this is an encode once then just CDN the files. I can't imagine that this would be a significant cost.
- spenczar5 7y agoHugely slower, and there is little (maybe zero?) hardware encoding support out there, which makes it too expensive for most use cases. You are completely right about Netflix’s needs here. Spending thousands of dollars on re-encoding video to shave off 1% of its size in bytes can easily be profitable at the scale of a hit show like Stranger Things.
- microcolonel 7y agoAnd the savings are much better than 1%, if they really do spend that much time encoding. The complexity of encoding is relatively similar for equivalent quality/bitrate (at least with some of the encoders).
- tambre 7y ago> there is little (maybe zero?) hardware encoding support out there There are companies offering cloud AV1 FPGA encoding on beefy servers. I'd imagine the performance and quality is much better than what is available to mere mortals right now.
- MayeulC 7y agoYeah, I was going to comment to that effect as well. Another comment implied they went for SVT-AV1, but (provided the IP is available) encoding on a big FPGA makes sense, regardless of the codec. Plus, you buy the HW once, and can use it multiple times thereafter.
- jedberg 7y agoThere is a significant one time cost to a new codec, because the entire library needs to be re-encoded, but that cost is more than made up for as long as one of two things are true: 1) It takes significantly fewer resources to stream to customers (bandwidth, CPU, disk, RAM, etc) or 2) It provides a significantly better experience for the user, which translates to more retention (either better picture quality or fewer video pauses or both). If you can find a codec that does both, that's worth far more than any encoding cost.
- brobot182 7y agoWhat does “hardware support” mean exactly? Are we talking about general-purpose SIMD instructions? Or do phones have dedicated circuits that do larger parts of the decoding?
- sleavey 7y agoGiven that this is ARM, will this become available to the Raspberry Pi some time? I've set up a Raspberry Pi 4 as a media center but Netflix doesn't work because of codec issues.
- IntelMiner 7y agoNetflix only works on devices that support its DRM implementations. I don't think Widevine works on ARM/ARM64 On Android there's some specific API they call that only works on "certified" devices from Google. Random hobbyist builds wont work
- Narushia 7y agoWidevine is supported on Android, and is utilized by the MediaDrm APIs.[1][2] Netflix uses Google’s SafetyNet API to make sure the device is “certified”. When this API check returns false, some features (like downloading media for offline viewing) will be disabled for the device. In some cases, the app won’t even show up in Google Play. Devices with a custom ROM are likely to fail the test, but luckily the check can be circumvented with the hide feature of Magisk[3]. Netflix works fine on my LineageOS-powered device when using Magisk. But even if your device passes the SafetyNet checks, you might not be able to play HD videos. This depends on the Widevine security level, which can be L1, L2 or L3; only devices with L1 are allowed to play HD videos. You can check your device’s Widevine security level with DRM Info[4], for example. Netflix also lists specific device models and chipsets for which they support HD streaming.[5] [1] https://source.android.com/devices/drm https://source.android.com/devices/drm [2] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaDrm https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaD... [3] https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk [4] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androidfung.drminfo https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androidfun... [5] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23939 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23939
- tootie 7y agoDoes this include Fire TV devices?
- dstaley 7y agoFor once I wish services like Netflix and YouTube would announce that "we've improved streaming video quality at the same data usage" as opposed to "we've improved data usage at the same quality". YouTube's compression is _horrid_, and Netflix's isn't much better. The quality between a 1080p BluRay versus Netflix's 4K stream is quite noticeable, especially in darker scenes.
- batmansmk 7y agoI agree that quality is not satisfactory, Im not convinced that it is the top problem to solve either. Let me explain: I read that video streaming was 50% of Internet's bandwidth, itself was about 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions. It's quite significant, and I would love quite the opposite of your reasoning: a lesser quality to leave us, engineers, time to find a sustainable way of watching videos online.
- codys 7y agoIt feels a bit irresponsible to through around unsourced numbers like that. Makes responding responsibly difficult.
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- spookthesunset 7y agoWhy don’t you go beat up on useless technology which provably pisses away energy (by design!) like the blockchain before you claiming consuming video content on the internet is killing the planet.
- Dontrememberit 7y agoThere's no need to get defensive over this. One can do both.
- tomsaffell 7y agoSo many well informed comments here I have to ask... and please forgive the spam... If you're interested in this area and might be be interested in working at YouTube then please email me using the address in my profile. I work in this area at YouTube.
- rossmohax 7y agoWhen video industry is going step away from 24fps legacy? Judder on panning camera scenes kills all the joy. That would be much bigger improvement than switching to 10bit color.
- Negitivefrags 7y agoUnfortunately the fact that lower budget TV was recorded onto tape at 60fps in the old days of analog television has effectively ruined high frame rate for everyone. Gemini Man just came out at 120fps in Cinemas and 60fps on blu ray and regardless of your feelings about the quality of the film, I would have thought anybody with eyes could appreciate how amazing the high frame rate looks. But no, it’s all people moaning about how it looks like a soap opera and “so unnatural” (too lifelike). It seems anyone who tries high frame rate is crucified for it, so directors aren’t exactly incentivised to try again.
- ralusek 7y agoHigh framerates DO look like soap operas. It makes it feel like you're watching a play, rather than a movie, and is extremely distracting. When I go to to people's houses, and they have a newish TV, it will invariably have frame interpolation of some kind on which effectively gives everything an approximated high frame rate. I immediately turn it off for them, and it is always met with either "oh, ya that was really bothering me" or "I can't tell the difference." I've never had someone want it turned back.
- shifto 7y agoI love those TV options when they work. I hate hate hate hate juddering motion on any screen. I will agree that sometimes the quality of an actor can degrade when you get to see more frames of them per second. (As if you are able to see more nuances which makes you know they are acting.)
- skrebbel 7y agoYou're mixing up frame interpolation and original 60FPS content. That's not the same thing at all.
- dojitza 7y agoIs there a convenient way to check which instruction set your phone supports? Something akin to hwinfo for Windows. https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=files&action=file&id=263 https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=files&action=file&id=263