12 ms·
AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025
- rarisma 1y ago30% over AV1 is crazy, it doesn't feel too long since AV1 released but that was in 2019.
- lxgr 1y agoYet I still only got hardware support for it on my first devices last year. The downside of "rapid" iteration on video codecs is that content needs to always be stored in multiple formats (or alternatively battery life on the client suffers from software playback, which is the route e.g. Youtube seems to be preferring).
- amiga386 1y agoHopefully that improves. The guy giving the presentation on AV2 made clear there was "rigorous scrutiny for hardware decoding complexity", and they were advised by Realtek and AMD on this. So it seems like they checked that all their ideas could be implemented efficiently in hardware as they went along, with advice from real hardware producers. Hopefully AV2-capable hardware will appear much quicker than AV1-capable hardware did.
- RicoElectrico 1y agoMaybe not only reference software, but also reference RTL should be provided? Yes, this is more work, but should speed up adoption immensely.
- IshKebab 1y agoThere's no point having reference RTL. The point of reference software is to demonstrate the correct behaviour for people implementing production grade libraries and RTL. Having an RTL version of that wouldn't add anything - it should have identical behaviour. Providing a production grade verified RTL implementation would obviously be useful but also entire companies exist to do that and they charge a lot of money for it.
- Neywiny 1y agoCould help people on the hobby or lower budget FPGA side. H.264/5/etc never really made it
- sagarm 1y agoCan a "lower budget" FPGA really outperform a consumer-grade CPU for this? And what hobbyist is sending off decoding chips to be fabbed? If this exists, it sounds interesting if incredibly impractical.
- tverbeure 1y agoIt’s not possible on any but the largest $$$ FPGAs… and even then we often need to partition over multiple FPGAs to make it fit. And it will only run at a fraction of the target clock speed.
- tverbeure 1y agoThere is absolutely no way an FPGA would make sense. The requirements for AV1 and H265 far exceed the hardware resources of lower budget FPGAs. For the same process, FPGA logic density is about 40x lower than ASIC, and lower budget FPGAs use older processes. A h265 or AV1 decoder requires millions of logic gates (and DRAM memory bandwidth.) Only high-end FPGAs provide that.
- Neywiny 1y agoThere's mention that the decode could get a lot easier. Here's an H264 core that runs on older lattice chips and only takes 56k luts. https://www.latticesemi.com/products/designsoftwareandip/intellectualproperty/ipcore/enciriscores/h264 https://www.latticesemi.com/products/designsoftwareandip/int... . Microchip's polarfires have a soft H.264 core as well taking under 20k. If AV2 will really be easier for hardware to implement, it might work out. Here's another example, H 264 decode in an artix 7, can do 1080p60 https://www.cast-inc.com/compression/avc-hevc-video-compression/h264-ld-bp https://www.cast-inc.com/compression/avc-hevc-video-compress... . So with all due respect, what in the world are you talking about?
- lxgr 1y agoOh, I don't doubt that it'll be hardware implementable, but it's a shame that current hardware is usually mostly out of luck with new codecs. (Sometimes parts can be reused in more programmable/compartmentalized decoding pipelines, but I haven't seen that often.)
- quaintdev 1y agoThat's reason I prefer firesticks over TVs
- pdimitar 1y agoI have to wonder whether PCIe devices that do hardware encoding / decoding might be the more viable path going forward? Wait, I just discovered GPUs, nevermind. [giggles] Still, the ability to do specialized work should probably be offloaded to specialized but pluggable hardware. I wonder what the economics of this would be...
- bapak 1y agoUnless they create a codec that GPUs are naturally good at, we will inevitably always be a couple of hardware cycles behind.
- astrange 1y agoYou can't do this because GPUs are parallel and decompression cannot be parallel. If there's any parallelism it means it's not compressed as much as it could be.
- mckirk 1y agoIt'd be really cool if we had 'upgradable codec FPGAs' in our machines that you could just use flash to the newest codec... but that'd probably be noticeably more expensive, and also not really in the interest of the manufacturers, who want to have reasons to sell new chips.
- daeken 1y agoBack in ~2004, I worked on a project to define a codec virtual machine, with the goal of each file being able to reference the standard it was encoded against, along with a link to a reference decoder built for that VM. My thought was that you could compile that codec for the system you were running on and decode in software, or if a sufficient DSP or FPGA was available, target that. While it worked, I don't think it ever left my machine. Never moved past software decoding -- I was a broke teen with no access to non-standard hardware. But the idea has stuck with me and feels more relevant than ever, with the proliferation of codecs we're seeing now. It has the Sufficiently Smart Compiler problem baked in, but I tried to define things to be SIMD-native from the start (which could be split however it needed to be for the hardware) and I suspect it could work. Somehow.
- axiolite 1y ago> FPGAs' in our machines that you could just use flash to the newest codec They're called GPUs... They're ASICs rather than FPGAs, but it's easy to update the driver software to handle new video codecs. The difficulty is motivating GPU manufacturers to do so... They'd rather sell you a new one with newer codec support as a feature.
- toast0 1y agoA lot of the GPUs have fixed function hardware to accelerate parts of encode/decode. If the new codec is compatible, sure. But often a new codec requires decoders to know how to work with new things that the fixed function hardware likely can't do. Encoding might actually be different. If your encoder hardware can only do fixed block sizes, and can only detect some types of motion, a driver change might be able to package it up as the new codec. Probably not a lot of benefit, other than ticking a box... but might be useful sometimes. Especially if you say offload motion detection, but the new codec needs different arithmetic encoding, you'd need to use cpu (or general purpose gpu) to do the arithmetic encoding and presumably get a size saving over the old codec.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoThe main delay the last time was corporations being dicks about IP but the two main culprits have got on board this time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- illiac786 1y agoIt’s insane to a point I am very skeptic. If true, that would be amazing.
- jonplackett 1y agoIt’s pretty amazing people are still finding ways to make video smaller. Is this just people being clever or is it also more processing power being thrown at the problem when decoding / encoding?
- dajonker 1y agoI believe patents play a big role here as well. Anything new must be careful to not (accidentally) violate any active patent, so there might be some tricks that can't currently be used for AV1/AV2
- cogman10 1y agoI think patents are quickly becoming less of a problem. A lot of the foundational encoding techniques have exited patent protection. H.264 and everything before it is patent free now. It's true you could still accidentally violate a patent but that minefield is clearing out as those patents simply have to become more esoteric in nature.
- PunchyHamster 1y ago...till someone decides to patent one of the new techniques used
- cogman10 1y agoYou can't patent something that's in use. Prior art is a defense to a patent claim/lawsuit. But that's not my main point. My main point is that we are going down a fitting path with codecs which makes it hard to come up with general patents that someone might stumble over. That makes patents developed by the MPEG group far less likely to apply to AOM. A lot of those more generally applicable patents, like the DCT for example, have expired.
- mikeyouse 1y agoThere are numerous patent trolls in this space with active litigation against many of the participants in the consortium who brought AV1. The EU was also threatening to investigate (likely to protect the royalty revenues of European companies)
- seydor 1y agoAll this high speed fiber for nothing...
- ttoinou 1y agowell we might start streaming 8K content ! Or maybe this could be used for 16K VR videos
- stop50 1y agoOr the next <insert shooter with ridiculous size here>
- throwaway48476 1y agoIt's a shame European energy efficiency rules made 8K non viable. It's a great resolution.
- lxgr 1y agoMeh, I'll take 1080p at a higher bitrate and in a wider color gamut over the pixel soup many VOD services serve and have the audacity to still call "UHD" any day.
- akie 1y agoYeah damn those Europeans for outlawing energy inefficient things
- throwaway48476 1y agoIt takes 2 seconds to turn the setting off. It's a pointless policy that just creates annoyance.
- illiac786 1y agoFramerate and hdr are more important. I don’t understand why 60fps never became ubiquitous, a pan scene in 30fps is horrible, its almost stroboscopic to me.
- IshKebab 1y agoWe must be reaching the limit at which video codecs can only achieve better quality by synthesizing details. That's already pretty prevalent in still images - phone cameras do it, and there are lots of AI resizing algorithms that do it. It doesn't look like AV2 does any of that yet though fortunately (except film grain synthesis but I think that's fine).
- meindnoch 1y agoI think Fabrice Bellard have been experimenting with neural codecs like that.
- magicalhippo 1y agoThe one I recall done by him was NNCP[1], a lossless compressor. [1]: https://bellard.org/nncp/ https://bellard.org/nncp/
- throwaway48476 1y agoComputings own Da Vinci.
- ksec 1y ago>We must be reaching the limit at which video codecs can only achieve better quality by synthesizing details. Not quite yet as shown in H.267. But at some point the computational requirement vs bandwidth saving benefits would no longer make sense.
- nasretdinov 1y agoArguably that's already happening with film grain — you have to extrapolate _what the original probably was_, encode it because it's smaller, then add the noise back to be more faithful to the original despite your image being better. I imagine e.g. a picture of an 8x8 circle actually takes more bits to encode than a mathematical description of the same circle
- 1y ago
- latexr 1y agoI always thought the name AV1 was partly a play on/homage to AVI (Audio Video Interlace), but AV2 breaks that. Even if it’s meant to be embedded into other container formats such as MP4, there are files with the .av1 extension and there is a video/AV1 MIME type (and possibly a UTI?). Does this mean we now need to duplicate all that to .av2 and video/AV2? What about the AVIF file format?
- ttoinou 1y agoDo you mean the file extension should only reflect the file format and not the codecs it has inside ? Maybe that’s what we did in the past and it was a bad idea. It’d be useful to know if you can read the file by looking only at its extension
- galad87 1y agoThat wouldn't scale well, something like .av1opusflacwebvtt?
- ttoinou 1y agoVideo codec is the most important though !
- axiolite 1y agoAre you deaf? I can't see how anyone else would be happy downloading a file they can watch fine but can't hear.
- ziml77 1y agoNot to mention that the codec barely tells you anything useful on its own. There are many parameters that affect the quality and file size. And heck it's not even guaranteed that you will be able to watch a video just given its codec. Like an old computer might be able to decode H.264 but only be able to do it in real-time at 480p due to processing requirements for going higher than that.
- jeden 1y agoI wait on new codec invented #AI
- occz 1y agoYou'll be waiting for a long time then, probably. Making codecs is actually a hard problem, the type of thing that AI completely falls over when tasked with.
- circuit10 1y agoConsidering AI is good at predicting things and that’s largely what compression does, I could see machine learning techniques being useful as a part of a codec though (which is a completely different thing from asking ChatGPT to write you a codec)
- lyu07282 1y agoYeah in the future we might use some sort of learned spatial+temporal representation to compress video, same for audio. Its easier to imagine for audio: Instead of storing the audio samples, we store text + some feature vectors that uses some model to "render" the audio samples.
- whycome 1y agoIt’s not absurd to think that you could send a model of your voice to a receiving party and then have your audio call just essentially be encoded text that gets thrown through the voice generator on the local machine. AI video could mean that essential elements are preserved (actors?) but other elements are generated locally. Hell, digital doubles for actors could also mean only their movements are transmitted. Essentially just sending the mo-cap data. The future is gonna be weird
- JimDabell 1y agoYeah, I brought that up here and got some interesting responses: > It would be interesting to see how far you could get using deepfakes as a method for video call compression. > Train a model locally ahead of time and upload it to a server, then whenever you have a call scheduled the model is downloaded in advance by the other participants. > Now, instead of having to send video data, you only have to send a representation of the facial movements so that the recipients can render it on their end. When the tech is a little further along, it should be possible to get good quality video using only a fraction of the bandwidth. — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907718 Specifically for voice, this was mentioned: > A Real-Time Wideband Neural Vocoder at 1.6 Kb/S Using LPCNet — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19520194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19520194
- Gigachad 1y agoIs anyone else getting a cloudflare blocked on this page?
- ksec 1y agoLet's hope they get more things right 2nd time around. AOM will do Live Session on 20th of October: The Future of Innovation is Open [1]. May be more data and numbers. Including Encoding Complexity increase, decoding complexity. Hardware Decoder roadmap. Compliance and Test kits. Future Profile. Involvement and improvement to both AVIF the format and the AV2 image codec. Better than JPEG-XL? Are the ~30% BDRATE compared to current best AV1 encoder or AV1 1.0 as anchor point? Live Encoding improvements? [1] https://aomedia.org/events/live-session-the-future-of-innovation-is-open/ https://aomedia.org/events/live-session-the-future-of-innova...
- alberth 1y agoWill streaming services ever stop over-compressing their content? I have a top-of-the-line 4K TV and gigabit internet, yet the compression artifacts make everything look like putty. Honestly, the best picture quality I’ve ever seen was over 20 years ago using simple digital rabbit ears. You especially notice the compression on gradients and in dark movie scenes. And yes — my TV is fully calibrated, and I’m paying for the highest-bandwidth streaming tier. Not my tv, but a visual example: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fwhat-is-causing-this-effect-and-is-there-a-way-to-fix-it-v0-r3f37nsyc3dc1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcfbe08390ef6d224a1338323d4279aa8394b10c9 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
- RamRodification 1y agoIt's a little surprising to me that there generally aren't more subscription tiers where you can pay more for higher quality. Seems like free money, from people like you (maybe) and me.
- Avamander 1y agoYou can already pay for 4K or "enhanced bitrate" but it's still relatively low bitrate and what's worse, this service quality is not guaranteed. I've had Apple TV+ downgrade to 1080p and lower on a wired gigabit connection so many times.
- Neywiny 1y agoAnd on top of that a lot of streaming services don't go above 1080p on desktop, and even getting them to that point is a mess of DRM. I sometimes wonder if this is the YouTube powerhouse casting a bad shadow. As LTT says, don't try to compete with YouTube. They serve so much video bandwidth it's impossible to attempt. So all these kinda startup streaming services can't do 4k. Too much bandwidth.
- mdasen 1y agoI'm not surprised they don't offer an even higher tier. When you're pricing things, you often need to use proxies - like 1080p and 4K. It'd be hard to offer 3 pricing tiers: 1080p, 4K, 4K but actually good 4K that we don't compress to hell. That third tier makes it seem like you're being a bit fraudulent with the second tier. You're essentially admitting that you've created a fake-4K tier to take people's money without delivering them the product they think they're buying. At some point, a class-action lawsuit would use that as a sort of admission that you knew you weren't giving customers what they were paying for and that it was being done intentionally, both of which matter a lot. Right now, Netflix can say stuff like "we think the 4K video we're serving is just as good." If they offer a real-4K tier, it's hard to make that argument.
- AaronAPU 1y agoCodec implementation and optimization was probably my favorite type of work. It would be fun to dive deep into AV2 in those areas but no time!
- 7e 1y agoOh, is more HEVC stuff finally going off patent? They’re the leaders.
- illiac786 1y agoIt would be great. As to being the leaders, even without the patented stuff, AV1 is still more efficient.
- mrbluecoat 1y agoHooray, finally a codec name that doesn't look like AVI
- HelloUsername 1y ago> finally a codec name that doesn't look like AVI Isn't AVI a container format and not a codec?
- mafuy 1y agoThat's not important for the sentence, as written.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoWho does this benefit? Sounds like this stuff mainly benefits streaming providers and not users. We get to go through the whole rigamarole again where hardware is made obsolete because it doesn't support acceleration.
- jug 1y agoHow does it not help users to lower your mobile bandwidth use? This is especially useful in the era of TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube.
- infogulch 1y agoWhen are they going to make a video codec based on gaussian splatting?