5 ms·

AV1 have other costs, AFAIK it's so slow to encode that encoding farm cost become much more significant.

bastawhiz 6y ago
For now. When h.264 was new, I remember my dual G5 Mac taking 2-3 times the duration of a 1080p video to encode. Today, my phone can encode video of roughly equal resolution in near real time. It would be unsurprising to see the next generations of processors include optimizations for AV1.
- pdxandi 6y ago
  Could that be in part because newer iPhones perform H264 decoding on the GPU?
  - kfarr 6y ago
    IIRC there's usually a dedicated piece of hardware for h264 encoding in most phones now (not the gpu per se)
    - pdxandi 6y ago
      Just realized they were taking about encoding anyway. I’m not sure if that’s usually performed on the same chipset. I don’t know if iPhones have a dedicated chipset for H264, I would be a bit surprised. I could probably look it up later.
      - ksec 6y ago
        > I don’t know if iPhones have a dedicated chipset for H264, Yes it does, both H.264 ( AVC ) and H.265 ( HEVC ). But that doesn't really matter because your ( initial ) point still stands, real time H.264 encoding isn't taxing on an A14 anymore. Remember H.264's work started before 2000 and finalised in 2003. That is like playing Doom 3 on your iPhone. No longer technically taxing by any means even if you are playing it at native resolution. However the industry is well aware of the slow down [1] of Moore's law. The cost increase as well as TDP headroom. So thinking we could continue to throw hardware at the problem simply doesn't work. [1] Moore's Law actually includes a time frame within it, so it would not be wrong to say the law is "dead" considering it has slowed down way beyond its time limit within margin of error. But modern day's media and computer PR tends to use Moore's law as word for transistor improvement.
        pdxandi 6y ago
        Okay, thanks. Just got a chance to look it up and indeed, beginning with the Apple A9 processor, there are H.264 and H.265 hardware decoders.
clouddrover 6y ago
Netflix decided AV1 was worth it: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-android-d5264a515202 https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and... https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encoder-and-decoder-ad295d9b5ca2 https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encod...
- klodolph 6y ago
  Netflix surely spends less compute power encoding videos than sites like YouTube though, right? Netflix skews more towards fewer videos, higher view counts, more money per video.
  - clouddrover 6y ago
    YouTube rolled out AV1 support quite some time ago. Many YouTube videos are AV1 encoded. Here's one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Yk6FrjMkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Yk6FrjMkQ You can tell if it's playing back in AV1 in your browser by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Stats for Nerds" to find out the video and the audio codecs. On my system in Firefox it's AV1 for video and Opus for audio. For that video the file size savings are a bit hit and miss. AV1 saves a lot versus H.264 at 1080p, saves a little bit at 720p and 480p, and saves a bit more at 360p. The 1080p results for that video are: - AV1 50.28MiB - VP9 69.12MiB - H.264 106.68MiB So a clear win at 1080p for AV1 versus VP9 and H.264. Sometimes YouTube's AV1 encodes can actually end up being bigger than the H.264 versions due to the vagaries of automated transcoding. When AV1 support was newly added to Firefox I used this 1080p60 video as a benchmark for my system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8 Over the course of the development of Firefox's AV1 support and the switch to the dav1d decoder (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d) that video has gone from being unwatchable due to too many dropped frames to now playing back smoothly. My system still struggles with AV1 above 1080p in Firefox though.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      I’m interested in the relative CPU costs of encoding, so this doesn’t really address that. When you say “many” videos are AV1-encoded, it makes me wonder why other videos aren’t AV1-encoded, if supported. Presumably there is some cost/benefit analysis at Google to decide which formats to use, and it is decided that a particular video should not be encoded using AV1 due to the resulting impact on disk/CPU/network usage (more disk, more CPU, less network egress). I also suppose YouTube has a massive pool of low-priority batch services for transcoding and can do last-minute encoding for unpopular videos / unpopular formats, so YouTube’s tradeoff will not be the same as your tradeoff. I just wonder what the tradeoff is.
zanny 6y ago
Its going to see adoption is widely distributed content first - its why Google and Netflix are so gung-ho on it, they see the same file downloaded millions of times and in those circumstances bandwidth savings are huge over the encode times. Eventually the ubiquity of hardware acceleration plus Moore's Law should make even lackluster hardware encoders generally available so average joes can use AV1 without needing to wait a day for a half hour of footage.

For now. When h.264 was new, I remember my dual G5 Mac taking 2-3 times the duration of a 1080p video to encode. Today, my phone can encode video of roughly equal resolution in near real time. It would be unsurprising to see the next generations of processors include optimizations for AV1.

pdxandi 6y ago
Could that be in part because newer iPhones perform H264 decoding on the GPU?
- kfarr 6y ago
  IIRC there's usually a dedicated piece of hardware for h264 encoding in most phones now (not the gpu per se)
  - pdxandi 6y ago
    Just realized they were taking about encoding anyway. I’m not sure if that’s usually performed on the same chipset. I don’t know if iPhones have a dedicated chipset for H264, I would be a bit surprised. I could probably look it up later.
    - ksec 6y ago
      > I don’t know if iPhones have a dedicated chipset for H264, Yes it does, both H.264 ( AVC ) and H.265 ( HEVC ). But that doesn't really matter because your ( initial ) point still stands, real time H.264 encoding isn't taxing on an A14 anymore. Remember H.264's work started before 2000 and finalised in 2003. That is like playing Doom 3 on your iPhone. No longer technically taxing by any means even if you are playing it at native resolution. However the industry is well aware of the slow down [1] of Moore's law. The cost increase as well as TDP headroom. So thinking we could continue to throw hardware at the problem simply doesn't work. [1] Moore's Law actually includes a time frame within it, so it would not be wrong to say the law is "dead" considering it has slowed down way beyond its time limit within margin of error. But modern day's media and computer PR tends to use Moore's law as word for transistor improvement.
      - pdxandi 6y ago
        Okay, thanks. Just got a chance to look it up and indeed, beginning with the Apple A9 processor, there are H.264 and H.265 hardware decoders.

clouddrover 6y ago

Netflix decided AV1 was worth it: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-android-d5264a515202 https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and... https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encoder-and-decoder-ad295d9b5ca2 https://netflixtechblog.com/svt-av1-an-open-source-av1-encod...

klodolph 6y ago
Netflix surely spends less compute power encoding videos than sites like YouTube though, right? Netflix skews more towards fewer videos, higher view counts, more money per video.
- clouddrover 6y ago
  YouTube rolled out AV1 support quite some time ago. Many YouTube videos are AV1 encoded. Here's one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Yk6FrjMkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Yk6FrjMkQ You can tell if it's playing back in AV1 in your browser by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Stats for Nerds" to find out the video and the audio codecs. On my system in Firefox it's AV1 for video and Opus for audio. For that video the file size savings are a bit hit and miss. AV1 saves a lot versus H.264 at 1080p, saves a little bit at 720p and 480p, and saves a bit more at 360p. The 1080p results for that video are: - AV1 50.28MiB - VP9 69.12MiB - H.264 106.68MiB So a clear win at 1080p for AV1 versus VP9 and H.264. Sometimes YouTube's AV1 encodes can actually end up being bigger than the H.264 versions due to the vagaries of automated transcoding. When AV1 support was newly added to Firefox I used this 1080p60 video as a benchmark for my system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8 Over the course of the development of Firefox's AV1 support and the switch to the dav1d decoder (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d) that video has gone from being unwatchable due to too many dropped frames to now playing back smoothly. My system still struggles with AV1 above 1080p in Firefox though.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    I’m interested in the relative CPU costs of encoding, so this doesn’t really address that. When you say “many” videos are AV1-encoded, it makes me wonder why other videos aren’t AV1-encoded, if supported. Presumably there is some cost/benefit analysis at Google to decide which formats to use, and it is decided that a particular video should not be encoded using AV1 due to the resulting impact on disk/CPU/network usage (more disk, more CPU, less network egress). I also suppose YouTube has a massive pool of low-priority batch services for transcoding and can do last-minute encoding for unpopular videos / unpopular formats, so YouTube’s tradeoff will not be the same as your tradeoff. I just wonder what the tradeoff is.

zanny 6y ago

Its going to see adoption is widely distributed content first - its why Google and Netflix are so gung-ho on it, they see the same file downloaded millions of times and in those circumstances bandwidth savings are huge over the encode times. Eventually the ubiquity of hardware acceleration plus Moore's Law should make even lackluster hardware encoders generally available so average joes can use AV1 without needing to wait a day for a half hour of footage.