3 ms·

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 o

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.

clouddrover 6y ago
> When you say “many” videos are AV1-encoded, it makes me wonder why other videos aren’t AV1-encoded They will be eventually. The priority goes to the videos with the highest trending view counts because that's where the bandwidth savings are going to be the most significant. This video is five days old and has an AV1 encode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8oD9jlCFJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8oD9jlCFJw Whereas this video which has been there for nearly 7 years does not yet have an AV1 encode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqf1BdsV5WE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqf1BdsV5WE With only 7,777 views it doesn't matter that much if it has an AV1 encode (or even a VP9 encode really). The bandwidth savings won't be that significant for the number of views it gets.
- amadvance 6y ago
  Also consider that all video have a H264 encoding to play on low end devices. Any additional encoding, in VP9 or AV1, is an additional cost as the H264 encoding cannot be avoided. Even VP9 is not used for all video. Only if the video is 4K or 2K7, or has a high number of view.
  - clouddrover 6y ago
    > Even VP9 is not used for all video. Only if the video is 4K or 2K7, or has a high number of view. No, the low view count video example I provided above has VP9 encodes for all resolutions, 144p through to 1080p. Lots of low view count videos are encoded in VP9. But when VP9 was new it followed the same approach AV1 is following now: high trending view count videos get the priority.

clouddrover 6y ago

> When you say “many” videos are AV1-encoded, it makes me wonder why other videos aren’t AV1-encoded They will be eventually. The priority goes to the videos with the highest trending view counts because that's where the bandwidth savings are going to be the most significant. This video is five days old and has an AV1 encode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8oD9jlCFJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8oD9jlCFJw Whereas this video which has been there for nearly 7 years does not yet have an AV1 encode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqf1BdsV5WE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqf1BdsV5WE With only 7,777 views it doesn't matter that much if it has an AV1 encode (or even a VP9 encode really). The bandwidth savings won't be that significant for the number of views it gets.

amadvance 6y ago
Also consider that all video have a H264 encoding to play on low end devices. Any additional encoding, in VP9 or AV1, is an additional cost as the H264 encoding cannot be avoided. Even VP9 is not used for all video. Only if the video is 4K or 2K7, or has a high number of view.
- clouddrover 6y ago
  > Even VP9 is not used for all video. Only if the video is 4K or 2K7, or has a high number of view. No, the low view count video example I provided above has VP9 encodes for all resolutions, 144p through to 1080p. Lots of low view count videos are encoded in VP9. But when VP9 was new it followed the same approach AV1 is following now: high trending view count videos get the priority.