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On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome. <rant>On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increa
by mroche 4y ago
On one hand, that's great for anyone watching HEVC content in Chrome.
<rant>On the other, I'd prefer to not see further adoption of HEVC and instead see increased deployment of VP9 and AV1 wherever possible. Let MPEG-LA and the other HEVC patent pools+holders... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Future looking, no one should even touch VVC/H.266.</rant>
Unfortunately the above rant does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding. Codec support is a difficult game to balance. I'm hopeful that by the time AVC/H.264's patent pools fully expire later this decade we'll all have moved on to newer and better (non-royalty patent-unencumbered) things.
- hot_gril 4y agoAdd the hardware support, then we can talk about dropping the proprietary ones. There's no way the costs of royalties, no matter how they indirectly affect me as a user, outweigh the cost of my CPU chugging to handle unoptimized video.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoHEVC is in the VP9 generation of codecs. https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/ https://bitmovin.com/vp9-vs-hevc-h265/ Many SoCs support hardware acceleration for VP9 decoding. http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/socs
- ksec 4y agoI just want the best codec, and I am willing to a pay a dollar for it. For Video, H.266 / VVC is just technically superior in every single way. For Images, JPEG Xl is the best for 95%+ of use cases. For audio, we have a AAC-LC, literally as ubiquitous as MP3, true patent free, and at 128+kbps, 95% of cases as good as the state of the audio codec. And yet we end up in a world where the only accepted choice is AV1 for video, AVIF for images and Opus for Audio.
- doc_gunthrop 4y agoFor audio there's also OGG Vorbis, which is open-source and royalty-free and superior to MP3 at comparable bitrates. EDIT: looks like opus is actually the successor to Vorbis.
- atoav 4y agoWhile I agree with the rest, I must say that in one point you are wrong. Opus is better than AAC-LC. It spans a much wider spectrum of bitrates and it sounds good¹ at any of those. On top Opus is open source which AAC-LC is not afaik. --- ¹ good is subjective, I earn my money as a freelance audio engineer, so I should have the ears to notice anything wrong with it.
- colinsane 4y agois it possible to implement generic/unencumbered blocks at the HW level and then string them together at the SW or firmware layer? how much efficiency do you lose? if you can move all the patentable stuff into SW then we can do the same thing we all did with mp3 patents: i.e. ignore them (see: LAME).
- wmf 4y agoNo, "we" cannot just ignore patents by implementing them in software. Maybe you can but that doesn't scale.
- colinsane 4y agotell that to every Linux user who was doing anything with mp3's before the patents expired just a couple years ago. i'm pretty sure even the Windows version of Audacity -- a tool with over 100 million downloads -- integrated with it. are you claiming the LAME approach wasn't successful? or that its success was a fluke, context-dependent, or for some other reason is a bad analogue?
- olliej 4y agoLAME is a really great example of why patents exist: the need to avoid the mp3 patents resulted in the development of technology that was superior to that covered by the mp3 patents. Do people really think LAME would have been developed if people were just reimplementing the existing mp3 encoder?
- lmm 4y agoThis is wrong in so many ways I'm not sure where to start. LAME was covered by the patents, so your whole idea is backwards and even if it weren't it's not supported by any evidence - there's just no relationship between patentability and how many encoders get implemented independently or not.
- 4y ago
- gjsman-1000 4y agoDon’t worry - VVC found its way into the new Europe DVB Broadcast TV standard, as well as the upcoming Brazilian Broadcast TV standards. (As for America, ATSC 3.0 / NextGen TV uses… HEVC. Better than MPEG-2, I guess.)
- davidf18 4y agoAV1 would be ideal to support. It is resource intensive for software, but with M2 MacBook Pros, for example and upcoming iPhone A17 processors, the AV1 decompression and compression codecs could be put in the hardware. AV1 reputedly is 30% more efficient than HEVC, important for a number of cases, such as more efficient use of bandwidth over cellular. For FaceTime over cellular Apple today uses the HEVC codecs if available on source and destination phones. In software AV1 is very resource intensive.
- gowings97 4y agoM2 doesn't have AV1 hardware decode. My guess is that the next shot is with a TSMC N3E chip, which _may_ debut with iPhone 15 Pro. There's been conflicting reports if N3E will be ready when Apple needs it - September 2023 if it's for iPhone 15. N3E based M3 Macbook Pro with hardware raytracing and hardware accelerated AV1 decode/encode would be nice.
- davidf18 4y ago
- Thaxll 4y agoDid you tried to encode anything with av1? Even with a high end CPU it's just not feasible, I tried with ffmpeg and it was encoding a single digit fps per seconds. A video of just 10min would take many hours, on the other end h265 encoding is slow but doable. Edit: just retried on my laptop: 0.6fps with a 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Using the lastest version of ffmpeg with the sample from the wiki: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 av1_test.mkv It's that slow that I don't even get the file size to change on disk, still 0 I guess the ffmpeg encoded buffer is still too small to be flushed out after a minute.
- sorenjan 4y agoSVT-AV1 is as fast or faster than x265 for me on my 10+ year old CPU, at least when using high (fast) presets. Here's a guide with some various options for using it with ffmpeg: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/Ffmpeg.md https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/F...
- prvc 4y agoWith the correct encoder and settings, it can be faster to encode than x265, for any given "efficiency" that x265 can achieve. Of course, the efficiency can be pushed higher than that, too, still with a reasonable encoding time.
- awill 4y agoexactly. vp9 isn't actually that good. It's clearly worse than hevc. AV1 is better, but there's limited hardware encoding/decoding support. The result is exactly as expected.
- Dylan16807 4y agohttps://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png This picture is a little old now but it should get across the point of why libaom isn't a meaningful speed test. It can be set to go faster, but the default speed is only one notch faster than on this chart.
- i80and 4y ago
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago> does not address the gap in hardware support between HEVC and AV1 for efficient accelerated decoding I'm rooting for AV1 just the same as everyone else, but it's still nowhere close to HEVC in terms of hardware support, or even general quality/efficiency. It's just going to take some more time.
- woojoo666 4y agoImo it's mostly just Apple holding it back. Once Safari starts supporting AV1, then websites will start using it
- bscphil 4y agoIt's ironic, not one week ago there were a bunch of complaints on this site saying that Google was abusing their position of power (controlling YouTube, Chrome, Android TV, etc) by pushing AV1. Now they bring HEVC support to Chrome and the top comment is another complaint! (That said, I agree with you. I think a codec being royalty free is a very good reason to prefer it to other codecs.)
- makeitdouble 4y agoTBF they can be abusing their position + helping other companies abuse their position as well. Just reading about the historical context of AV1 it all feels like huge dirty lawyer battles involving troves of money thrown around, with the user as a hostage indirectly footing the bill in the end so we can't just ignore all the drama. I would want to side with Google on the open side they seem to be championing, but there's no way it doesn't come with huge side effects that we will pay sooner or later. All to say, it's looks like a complicated enough matter that opinions will be devised and all options might not be great, some just being more acceptable than others.
- ISL 4y agoThere may be more than one person posting on HN.
- concinds 4y agoThe comment was about the internet "hivemind"; no need to be pedantic about it. Keep in mind that upwards of 95% of people will read comments but not post any themselves (and to address an obvious retort, sure, it'll be a different 95% for each submission). So the general "tone" of the comments absolutely impacts public perception, especially now that practically no-one consumes straight-news without social media commentary. Redditors use identical arguments: "we're different people!" when their website is the most groupthink-y of all.
- FeepingCreature 4y agoThreads are groupthink, but subreddits with diverse topics are less groupthink than you'd think. Different user groups turn out for different headlines, at different times, etc.
- girvo 4y agoI hope that AV1 doesn't get the same treatment as Opus though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158475 Royalty-free matters less when it turns out these bad actors can punish people for it. It's a little worrying frankly.
- dmitriid 4y agoDo you know that Google basically punishes others fir not using VP9 and AV1? https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues
- fomine3 4y agoIt already exists https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-coding-decoding/video-coding-platform/license-terms/av1-license-terms https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co...
- girvo 4y agoOh "great". Software patents were such a mistake.
- olliej 4y agoSurely that depends - is this a bunch of generic and vague detail-less patents, or do they provide the actual information required to implement the thing it purports to describe. The core problem with “software patents” in the US sense is that the patent office appear to grant them by default if they are vague, only accepts specific types of pre-existing evidence that they are not new or novel, and once a patent is granted makes it as hard and expensive as possible to challenge the granted patents, and doesn’t allow you to recover costs if you are sued for a patent that is eventually revoked. All of those thing mean that the specifics of us patent law remain BS, but at the same time I think that everyone on HN does believe that IP should exist, and people should have rights to what they create.
- 4y ago
- NelsonMinar 4y agoI think it's remarkable that the pirate scene has barely touched VP9 or AV1. We discussed this 2.5 years ago, nothing really has changed except there's more H.265 than before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098
- sorenjan 4y agoI remember maybe ten years ago "real" pirates (from "the scene") thought that everything needed to be in rar format, and anything else was considered "p2p" and not as pure. They were also late with h264 and used xvid for far too long.
- austhrow743 4y agoFile size capped at 700mb to fit on cd's, bitrate be damned.
- rubatuga 4y agoJeez, I remember most pirated video was using xvid, what a dark time that was.
- hot_gril 4y agoxvid in 8 .part files you download separately from putlocker or megaupload, each is zipped with a password you have to find on a phpBB-based forum
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jjeaff 4y agoProbably all comes down to ffmpeg not supporting av1 well. Pretty much everyone uses ffmpeg or a wrapper around ffmpeg like handbrake to encode. And my understanding is that ffmpeg implements an old and very slow and partially broken version of av1.
- 4y ago