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I was recently asked why so few chips support decoding AV1 in hardware. There were multiple mutually incompatible AV1 versions early in development, and some c
by baybal2 3y ago
I was recently asked why so few chips support decoding AV1 in hardware.
There were multiple mutually incompatible AV1 versions early in development, and some companies chose to not to implement either until the situation settles down.
But by that time X265 was already deployed en masse in the wild. And now X266 is about to take over.
Many will chose to leapfrom AV1 straight to X266.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agofirst time I hear about X266, interesting. I have just re-enocded a lot of Videos into AV1. Oh well....
- belltaco 3y agoIsn't re-encoding almost always a loss in quality? Unless you're doing it from uncompressed video or from super high quality video to reduce file size.
- bdhcuidbebe 3y agoYea. Also a waste of electricity.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agonot unless the licensing gets figured out. as long as decoding requires paying no browser or website will support it.
- mschuster91 3y agoNot just that. Video codecs are insanely hard to get right even in software, FPGAs capable of running a decoder are expensive, the intersection of "people who know video codecs" and "people who know Verilog" is pretty small, and a decoder has to support a lot of leeway in ingestion to allow for others' buggy encoders... and if you're also making encoders, shipping bad hardware encoders at scale will kill your reputation as now everyone else has to deal with implementing quirks for your bad content. That means developing and testing an ASIC encoder or decoder block is one hell of an expense. If you're someone like Apple with more cash than the GDP of many countries or if you're making an implementation of a codec that is a worldwide standard (like h264/h265 are) and you can simply make your profit on selling billions of chips, you can do this. But everyone else can't.