24 ms·
AV1 video codec gains broader hardware support
- llcooliovice 3y agoNow supported by the Apple M3 chips.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoOnly decode, not encode. Intel ARC GPUs also do encode.
- adrian_b 3y agoAlso the AMD Phoenix CPUs for laptops (7640/7840/7940), the AMD RDNA 3 GPUs and the NVIDIA RTX 4000 GPUs support AV1 encoding.
- my123 3y agoThe Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and X Elite have AV1 encoding too
- whynotminot 3y agoI think it makes sense for companies to start with decode though. That hits pretty much 100% of users--everyone watches video. But only a small fraction of users actually create content and need accelerated encode. And Apple especially I think is unlikely to use AV1 for their video recording, given their investment in other formats for that use-case.
- repelsteeltje 3y ago> And Apple especially I think is unlikely to use AV1 for their video recording, given their investment in other formats for that use-case. I concur. The raison d'être for AV1 is (lack of) patent license royalties. These apply to user devices as well as services. Think Google: Android as well as YouTube cost fortunes in AVC/HEVC licenses, so here AV1 makes sense. On the other hand, Apple sells expensive hardware and has no problem ponying those licenses. Soon after adopting HEVC they doubled down with Dolby Vision which technically adds very little on top of standard HDR features already available in HEVC and AVC but present serious interop problems for device come with shiny Dolby stickers.
- kevincox 3y agoPlus unless you are streaming or producing a ton of video most users can afford to wait a bit for software encoding (which is often better quality as well). So encoding is far less important than decoding.
- lxgr 3y agoAs far as I can tell, Apple has always only supported decoding for non-MPEG codecs. And their encoders (at least on macOS in the past) usually don’t yield results comparable to software or dedicated quality-optimized encoding ASICs, so if I wanted high quality at low bitrates I’d have to reencode offline anyway. It would be nice to have it available for video conferencing or game streaming, though.
- arbitrarian 3y agoAccording to the article, it's supported by every browser except Edge. It will be interesting to see who ultimately ends up making a better IE, Safari or Microsoft. So far, it seems Safari is winning, given the ever growing set of standards they don't support, but maybe this is Edge trying to catch up?
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoThe data at CanIUse.com seems to suggest they're going backward and used to have an installable plugin: https://caniuse.com/av1 https://caniuse.com/av1 see also: https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/windows/thread/youtube-not-working-in-edge https://www.thurrott.com/forums/microsoft/windows/thread/you... Which seems to be claiming the software fallback has been suddenly yanked, temporarily breaking YouTube which fixed it by serving VP9 instead but maybe AV1 hardware decode is still working?
- pjc50 3y agoOdd given that Edge is Chromium.
- xvilka 3y ago[flagged]
- mort96 3y agoSo a few things here: 1. A fair number of users are gonna use the default browser. You probably want to support those users. 2. iOS users can't download non-WebKit browsers. You probably want to support iOS users.
- sixothree 3y agoBecause they want something less user hostile than Chrome?
- cptcobalt 3y agoWhat is a "real" web browser? One would assume its an application that takes web content and parses it for user display so they can use it to browse the web...so Edge and Safari would surely be real, right?
- BoumTAC 3y agoPerhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
- londons_explore 3y agoDesign cycles of hardware is long. The person who benefits from a more efficient codec tends to be netflix/youtube (lower bandwidth costs), and they are far far removed from the chipmaker - market forces get very weak at that distance.
- nickpeterson 3y agoAlso, specialized hardware for a specific format feels like a really good way to have a useless part of a cpu if the format stops being used.
- imtringued 3y agoPeople never stopped using VP8. In fact, your screen sharing is probably wasting excessive amounts of CPU every day because there is no hardware support.
- kccqzy 3y agoYouTube makes their own chips: https://www.protocol.com/amp/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asics-2657907286 https://www.protocol.com/amp/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asic... Netflix doesn't benefit since their catalog is orders of magnitude smaller.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoAV1 isn't particularly behind schedule compared with previous codec generstions. We could and should have moved faster if everything went well but Qualcomm in particular were being awkward about IP issues. Luckily the effort behind the David software codecs kept up the rollout momentum.
- baybal2 3y ago
- caskstrength 3y agoGlad to see Amazon is participating. I would love to have much higher Twitch stream quality with similar bitrate.
- dishsoap 3y agoI would love to see them triple the max bitrate cap from 1 MB/s to 3 or so
- lelag 3y agoI would add that broader AV1 support is also a good news for low latency application like Cloud gaming or streaming to VR headsets. HW accelerated encoding/decoding improve upon HEVC on every metrics so you can get near real-time streaming with higher quality and lower bandwidth requirements.
- rollcat 3y ago> improve upon HEVC on every metrics Color me the skeptic here, but which benchmark(s) are we talking about? Even h264 vs h265 is not a settled matter - if we truly consider every possible metric, including e.g. SW encoding.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoFor software encoding Intel suggest you can beat all the other classic SW encoders with AV1 as long as you have enough cores: https://d1qg7561fu8ubi.cloudfront.net/blog/BD-rate_fiugure5.png https://d1qg7561fu8ubi.cloudfront.net/blog/BD-rate_fiugure5.... Lower and to the left is "better" Edit: resolution on that graph image is terrible but they've been sharing it for a while in slide decks so you can probably find better quality by following links from here: https://networkbuilders.intel.com/blog/svt-av1-enables-highly-efficient-large-scale-video-on-demand-vod-services https://networkbuilders.intel.com/blog/svt-av1-enables-highl...
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoWhat was the situation on its efficiency compared to H.265 and similar?
- furyg3 3y agoIt's about 30% more efficient.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoWow that was unexpected. I checked online and it does say production encoders are faster and the result is somewhat smaller (for same quality). What a time to be alive.
- repelsteeltje 3y agoIts in the same ball park. Both do considerably better than AVC (h264), but many direct comparisons between HEVC (h265) and AV1 compare apples to oranges. Sure you can get 30% lower bitrate, but only at degraded quality levels or higher decode complexity. Also note that HEVC had a considerable head start (5 years?) so performant encoder (or even energy efficient decoders) took a while to catch up. Recent ffmpeg versions offer a lot of options, you'll find that even a basic comparison is PhD-level difficult ;-)
- bscphil 3y ago> Sure you can get 30% lower bitrate, but only at degraded quality levels or higher decode complexity. Thank you for pointing this out. This thread is a mess of claims at the moment because this simple fact is under-recognized. There are two accepted ways to compare codecs+settings: either (a) you perform a subjective comparison with the human eye using the same bitrate for both codecs, or (b) perform an "objective" metrics-based comparison where you match measured quality and compare the ratio of the bitrates. If you're looking only at 1080p SDR 8-bit video, even h264 is already commonly used at bitrates that can approach transparency to the source (visually lossless to the human eye) when encoded well. For example, a typical Blu-ray bitrate of ~30 Mbps can achieve transparency when well-encoded for most sources. The reason measures like "30%" are misleading is that if you try to match h264 performance at these high bitrates, you won't get anything close to 30% improvement (with HEVC over h264, or AV1 over HEVC). It can be negligible in a lot of cases. In other words, the improvement ratio from increasing the complexity of your media codec depends on the target quality of the encodes used in the test. AV1 achieves significant improvements ("30%") over HEVC only at the lowest qualities, think YouTube or Twitch streaming. At high bitrates, e.g. something acceptable for watching a movie, the improvement can be much less or even insignificant, and at near-transparency a lot of AV1 encoders actually seem to introduce artifacts that are hard to eliminate. AV1 seems heavily optimized for the typical streaming range of bitrates, and claims about its supposed improvement over HEVC need to be understood in that context.
- AshleysBrain 3y agoMicrosoft Edge does support AV1, but weirdly only through a Microsoft Store extension [1], even though Chrome has support built-in. This actually really sucks because in practice hardly any normal consumers would bother to install a strangely named extension, and so web developers have to assume it's largely unsupported in Edge. Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec, and means eventually in some year's time support can generally be relied upon when enough new hardware is in use. But that won't happen with Edge as things stand! I think it's high time the web had a single audio and video codec choice that is both open and widely supported, which is why I've proposed support for AV1 and Opus for the Interop 2024 effort [2] [3]. [1] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/av1-video-extension/9MVZQVXJBQ9V https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/av1-video-extension/9MVZQV... [2] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/485 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/485 [3] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/484 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/484
- CrendKing 3y agoMicrosoft Edge USED to support AV1 through the extension, but decided to disable the support altogether since v116. The "Can I use" website [1] has the up-to-date information on this. [1] https://caniuse.com/av1 https://caniuse.com/av1
- AshleysBrain 3y agoHuh, I didn't know that, good point! Even weirder though. Hopefully it's a prelude to built-in support.
- jug 3y agoThis can be treated as a rumor but I heard a Microsoft developer on Mastodon hint that they had been having trouble with a patent troll, so maybe that's the reason behind the kind of obnoxious workaround too. But that they were dealing with it.
- dannyw 3y agoIs AV1 better than HEVC? Or is it about the same, just freely licensed?
- FroshKiller 3y agoI don't think you can reduce the comparison to "better than," but AV1 certainly compresses to smaller files than HEVC. Maybe that's a better fit for your use case.
- windsurfer 3y agoHEVC isn't widely supported by web browsers: https://caniuse.com/hevc https://caniuse.com/hevc AV1 is supported by almost all web browsers: https://caniuse.com/av1 https://caniuse.com/av1
- frakkingcylons 3y agoNotable exceptions are Safari and Safari on iOS (unless you have an iPhone 15 Pro).
- alwillis 3y agoOr an M3 Mac.
- threeseed 3y agoMost of those browsers are just skins over the Chromium engine. And iOS Safari is arguably the most important browser at all since iPhones are disproportionally used amongst video content creators.
- Vrondi 3y agoHEVC is great for giving you quality in a smaller file size, for your local video files (due to being supported by more cameras and phones so far). AV1 has wider support for streaming video online at a higher quality (due to more browser support so far). So, at the moment, they are really best in two different use cases (subject to change, of course).
- m3kw9 3y agoWhat’s so special about AV1?
- throw0101c 3y agoCompared to H.264/AVC, you can get the same level of video quality in ~half the bandwidth (or double your quality for the same bandwidth). Compared to H.265/HEVC, AV1 has no patents and so anyone can implement it without worrying about licensing (there seem to 3+ groups that need to be paid off). The trade-off is that it is more computation intensive than H.264 (as is H.265).
- throw0101c 3y agoSelf-reply: Seems that there's now also H.266/VVC: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding Short 2023 article on H.266 versus AV1: * https://www.winxdvd.com/video-transcoder/h266-vvc-vs-av1.htm https://www.winxdvd.com/video-transcoder/h266-vvc-vs-av1.htm
- tizio13 3y agoQuite a lot actually. This codec is much more efficient at producing high quality video recording / streaming at much lower than normal bit rates when comparing to x264/5. Epos Vox has a good video describing the benefits: https://youtu.be/sUyiqvNvXiQ https://youtu.be/sUyiqvNvXiQ
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago* No patent fees. * Wide browser support. * High performance open source software decode available on x64 and ARM * High performance open source software encode available, tuned for multicore cloud encoding * default support for film grain emulation which alone can save about 30% bandwidth when content requires it.
- 3y ago
- RicoElectrico 3y agoIs it really _that_ hard to create a generic video decoding DSP whose firmware could be updated? Most codecs are very similar to each other. IIRC Texas Instruments used multicore DSP to decode MPEG back in the 90s. Or maybe we should have written codecs to be amenable towards GPU shader implementation...
- kllrnohj 3y ago> Or maybe we should have written codecs to be amenable towards GPU shader implementation... They are, but programmable GPU shaders are nearly always more power expensive than fixed function purpose specific silicon. It's why many key aspects of GPUs are still fixed function, in fact, including triangle rasteriziation and texture sampling/filtering.
- bee_rider 3y agoI wonder if encode could run on the iGPU? I think, at least, that one of the biggest use-cases for encode is game streamers (is this right?), they should have decent dGPUs anyway, so their iGPU is just sitting there.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoElemental wrote a GPU shader h264 encoder for the Radeon 5870 back in the day, marketed towards broadcasters who needed quality and throughput: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2586 https://www.anandtech.com/show/2586 Intel used to write hybrid encoders (that used some fixed function and some iGPU shader) for their older iGPUs. So the answer is yes... if you can fund the right group. But video encoders are hard. The kind of crack developer teams that can pull this off don't grow on trees.
- astrange 3y agoShaders have little benefit for anything with "compression" in the name. (De)compression is maximally serial/unpredictable because if any of it is predictable, it's not compressed enough. People used to want to write them because they thought GPU=fast and shaders=GPU, but this is just evidence that almost noone knows how to write a video codec.
- conjecTech 3y agoHow much silicon does it take to add an AV1 decoder to a chip? The areas Apple highlighted in their A17 release looked pretty substantial, but I wasnt sure if it was to scale. https://b3148424.smushcdn.com/3148424/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/iPhone_AV1_decoder.jpg?size=1920x1190&lossy=2&strip=1&webp=1 https://b3148424.smushcdn.com/3148424/wp-content/uploads/202...
- IshKebab 3y agoThat looks like a pure marketing slide to me. I don't think it would make sense to actually have separate dedicated silicon for these.
- asylteltine 3y agoHow would you do it in hardware otherwise?
- wyager 3y agoYou can either have a fully dedicated core for codecs, or you can just put certain codec related operations (like DCT-related SIMD) in your main cores. Cryptographic acceleration tends to use the latter approach.
- vetinari 3y agoVideo codecs usually come with GPUs, not CPUs. It is only on SoCs where this distinction is a more fuzzy. On a GPU, you didn't have an option to interleave normal program stream with specialized partial-decoding instruction. You put encoded frame in and you get decoded frame back, the media engine was separate block from compute. Though this is also changing; see Intel GuC firmware, which has (optionally) some decoding, encoding and processing based on compute.
- IshKebab 3y agoWith a DSP that has generic instructions that are especially useful for video codecs.
- botanical 3y agoI don't know what's up with AV1 software decoding but it uses considerably more CPU than HEVC or VP9
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoI wonder if it's just because it's new. I remember years ago the first 1.x versions of libopus used way more CPU than Vorbis to decode, now they're comparable. (This was on a teeny little chip where decoding 1 Vorbis stream took a measurable amount of CPU)
- rbultje 3y agoAV1 is more complex. Prediction can be more complex with things like "combined inter/intra" or "warped motion" or "overlapping block MC" compared to HEVC/VP9. Then there's additional postfilters like loop restoration, cdef and film grain that didn't exist in VP9 (just deblock - which also exists in AV1) or HEVC (deblock + sao). Entropy coding is more expensive than VP9 with per-symbol entropy updates (which HEVC also has). Bigger blocks are probably an overall win, but bigger transforms can be painful with many non-zero coefficients. And intermediates in 2D MC and bi-directional ("compound") prediction are 12-bit instead of 8-bit in VP9 for SDR/8bit video. This is more similar to HEVC. So overall, AV1 > HEVC > VP9 in terms of runtime complexity, this is expected, nothing you can do about it.
- dishsoap 3y agoIt looks like dav1d is (or was 2 years ago, maybe it's even faster now) on par with ffmpeg's hevc decoder in that aspect: https://youtu.be/wkZ4KfZ7x1k?t=656 https://youtu.be/wkZ4KfZ7x1k?t=656 You're right about VP9 though, definitely faster to decode, though there are trade-offs (video quality, encoding performance) when compared to HEVC.
- sergiotapia 3y agoI love AV1 for compressing my movies to 720p. I also convert any audio to Opus. I get to archive a ton of content on peanuts. The videos look great on my PC monitor or my phone and they come in at around 452MB (1hr 24m video). Here's my script if you're interested in trying it out on your content. param ( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [string]$sourceDir, [string]$destDir = $sourceDir ) $ffmpegPath = 'C:\Users\sergi\Downloads\ffmpeg.exe' Write-Output "Starting conversion..." Get-ChildItem $sourceDir -Include *.mp4,*.avi,*.mov,*.wmv,*.flv,*.webm,*.mkv -Recurse | ForEach-Object { $newFileName = $_.BaseName + '-av1-720p' + $_.Extension $destPath = Join-Path $_.Directory.FullName $newFileName Write-Output "Converting $($_.FullName) to 720p AV1..." & $ffmpegPath -i $_.FullName -vf scale=1280:720 -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 30 -preset 7 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -ac 2 $destPath } Write-Output "Conversion complete." And I just invoke it against a folder to recursively convert stuff. .\av1-convert.ps1 -sourceDir 'D:\Movies to convert\' As soon as there's something that can decode AV1 that's like an nvidia shield I will replace both of my shields. So far nothing like that exists to my knowledge. Even Roku 4k Pro's say "AV1" support in their spec but they still trigger transcoding on plex when doing a playback.
- kidfiji 3y agoAs someone who also has a 2019 Shield TV Pro and is waiting for the "next best thing", one resource I've been keeping my eye on is androidtv-guide.com: https://www.androidtv-guide.com/streaming-gaming/av1-androidtv-players/ https://www.androidtv-guide.com/streaming-gaming/av1-android...
- chungy 3y agoI don't recognize that language. Is it PHP?
- tredre3 3y agoIt's Powershell. It's Windows' Bash equivalent (admittedly much more advanced) but it's been open-sourced and ported to Linux as well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoIs this the new hardware treadmill? Every few years we need to switch codecs for minor bandwidth/quality gains to nudge us to buy new hardware that supports it?
- toastal 3y agoCan’t wait to see broader JPEG XL hardware support
- dcgudeman 3y agoIf anyone is wonder about the Microsoft Edge situation feel free to investigate the "licensing issue" referenced in this StackOverflow thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75459594/why-doesnt-edge-support-avif-images https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75459594/why-doesnt-edge... Although the thread is about AVIF (the image format based on AV1) I bet the same licensing issues are also holding back AV1 on edge.
- andrewstuart 3y agoSafari does not support AV1 playback.
- atlgator 3y agoAV1 hardware support is great and all, but what streaming services actually support it? Twitch did a pilot back in 2020 and the video quality was fantastic. They still haven't rolled it out.
- Chris_Newton 3y agoPossibly worth noting that the encoding speeds for AV1 have improved out of all recognition over the past few years. Depending on what Twitch were using, even back in 2020 it might have been orders of magnitude slower than encoding other relatively modern formats. Today that is no longer true and in some circumstances encoding AV1 seems to be faster than almost anything else since H264. So if hardware decoding is also improving, it’s certainly possible that more services could potentially use AV1 now or in the near future. (Source for the above is just some personal experiments. I happened to be doing a load of benchmarking with video codecs this weekend, as we’re hoping to start using AV1 for a website I run.)