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Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond
- kvirani 11mo agoTop post without a single comment and only 29 points. Clearly my mental model of how posts bubble to the top is broken.
- yjftsjthsd-h 11mo agoIIRC, there's a time/recency factor. If we assume that most people don't browse /newest (without commenting on should, I suspect this is true), then that seems like a reasonable way to help surface things; enough upvotes to indicate interest means a story gets a chance at the front page.
- IgorPartola 11mo agoAmazing. Proprietary video codecs need to not be the default and this is huge validation for AV1 as a production-ready codec.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoWhy does it matter if Netflix is using an open standard if every video they stream is wrapped in proprietary closed DRM?
- chii 11mo agobecause device makers will not care for the DRM, but will care for the hardware decoder they need to decide to put into their devices to decode netflix videos. By ensuring this video codec is open, it benefits everybody else now, as this same device will now be able to hardware decode _more_ videos from different video providers, as well as make more video providers choose AV1. Basically, a network effect for an open codec.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoYou’ve convinced me… (no snark intended)
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- csmpltn 11mo agoBut they still need to decode the proprietary DRM before it can be fed to the hardware decoder... lol
- cm2187 11mo agoI think the point is that if you are not Netflix, you can use AV1 as most of your clients devices support hardware acceleration thanks to the big guys using AV1 themselves.
- nevi-me 11mo agoI struggle to follow your point. They still need to do that for any codec, and I would think that the DRM decryption would be using algorithms that might also be hardware accelerated.
- fleroviumna 11mo ago[dead]
- ohhellnawman 11mo ago[dead]
- cheema33 11mo ago> Why does it matter if Netflix is using an open standard if every video they stream is wrapped in proprietary closed DRM? I am not sure if this is a serious question, but I'll bite in case it is. Without DRM Netflix's business would not exist. Nobody would license them any content if it was going to be streamed without a DRM.
- realusername 11mo agoI don't think anybody could suggest going back to Blueray at this point, if selling online without DRM would be the only choice, they would have to comply.
- reddalo 11mo ago>Without DRM Netflix's business would not exist. Nobody would license them any content if it was going to be streamed without a DRM. I don't agree. If people refused to watch DRM-protected content, they would get rid of it. For example, Pluto TV is a free streaming service that has much content without DRM. GOG lets you buy DRM-free games. Even Netflix itself lets you stream DRM-free content, albeit in low resolution.
- bobdvb 11mo agoFrom previous experience some platforms are considered a "leakage source" for content and major rights owners won't put their content there because it's too easy to steal from. The security measures that are put on streaming platforms aren't totally ineffective, they're restrictive but it's considered worth the trouble because platforms can actually measure the effect of restrictions. The low resolution option is something many rightsholders accept, but from a product proposition perspective it's difficult to explain to many customers. They're just grumpy that they paid for content and can only watch it in SD, that reduces your customer satisfaction. Better to do nothing than a poor job sometimes.
- IshKebab 11mo agoI'm not convinced by that. If DRM didn't exist then do you really think studios would be like "nah we'll just miss out on all that money". They just want DRM because it makes them even more money. Or at least they think it does. I have yet to find a single TV show or film that isn't available on Bittorrent so I don't think the DRM is actually preventing piracy in the slightest. I guess they want it in order to prevent legal tools from easily working with videos, e.g. for backup, retransmission etc.
- pbw 11mo agoThere's an HDR war brewing on TikTok and other social apps. A fraction of posts that use HDR are just massively brighter than the rest; the whole video shines like a flashlight. The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse.
- jsheard 11mo agoSounds like they need something akin to audio volume normalization but for video. You can go bright, but only in moderation, otherwise your whole video gets dimmed down until the average is reasonable.
- sieabahlpark 11mo ago[dead]
- illiac786 11mo agoI was about to write that. The algorithm need to be chosen, what is mostly used for audio gain normalization? Rolling average?
- solarkraft 11mo agoActually I don’t even agree with that. I don’t want to be flash banged.
- JoshTriplett 11mo agoThat's true on the web, as well; HDR images on web pages have this problem. It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR". But you could probably catch the most egregious cases, like "every single pixel in the video has brightness above 80%".
- eru 11mo ago> It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR". That sounds like a job our new AI overlords could probably handle. (But that might be overkill.)
- resolutefunctor 11mo agoThis is really cool. Props to the team that created AV1. Very impressive
- tr45872267 11mo ago>AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC Sounds like they set HEVC to higher quality then? Otherwise how could it be the same as AVC?
- dylan604 11mo agodefinitely reads like "you're holding it wrong" to me as well
- pornel 11mo agoThere are other possible explanations, e.g. AVC and HEVC are set to the same bitrate, so AVC streams lose quality, while AV1 targets HEVC's quality. Or they compare AV1 traffic to the sum of all mixed H.26x traffic. Or the rates vary in more complex ways and that's an (over)simplified summary for the purpose of the post. Netflix developed VMAF, so they're definitely aware of the complexity of matching quality across codecs and bitrates.
- tr45872267 11mo agoI have no doubt they know what they are doing. But it's a srange metric no matter how you slice it. Why compare AV1's bandwith to the average of h.264 and h.265, and without any more details about resolution or compression ratio? Reading between the lines, it sounds like they use AV1 for low bandwidth and h.265 for high bandwidth and h.264 as a fallback. If that is the case, why bring up this strange average bandwidth comparison?
- slhck 11mo agoYeah it's a weird comparison to be making. It all depends on how they selected the quality (VMAF) target during encoding. You couple easily end up with other results had they, say, decided to keep the bandwidth but improve quality using AV1.
- crazygringo 11mo agoWow. To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding. The article lists a bunch of examples of devices that have gained it in the past few years. I had no idea it was getting that popular -- fantastic news! So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support, I wonder what will be the next one?
- JoshTriplett 11mo ago> So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support, I wonder what will be the next one? Hopefully AV2.
- jsheard 11mo agoH266/VVC has a five year head-start over AV2, so probably that first unless hardware vendors decide to skip it entirely. The final AV2 spec is due this year, so any day now, but it'll take a while to make it's way into hardware.
- adgjlsfhk1 11mo agoH266 is getting fully skipped (except possibly by Apple). The licensing is even worse than H265, the gains are smaller, and Google+Netflix have basically guaranteed that they won't use it (in favor of AV1 and AV2 when ready).
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- johncolanduoni 11mo agoDid anybody, including the rightsholders, come out ahead on H265? From the outside it looked like the mutually assured destruction situation with the infamous mobile patents, where they all end up paying lawyers to demand money from each other for mostly paper gains.
- Eduard 11mo agoI'm surprised AV1 usage is only at 30%. Is AV1 so demanding that Netflix clients without AV1 hardware acceleration capabilities would be overwhelmed by it?
- adgjlsfhk1 11mo agoThere are a lot of 10 year old TVs/fire sticks still in use that have a CPU that maxes out running the UI and rely exclusively on hardware decoding for all codecs (e.g. they couldn't hardware decode h264 either). Image a super budget phone from ~2012 and you'll have some idea the hardware capability we're dealing with.
- FrostKiwi 11mo agoThanks to libdav1d's [1] lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration, but basically yes: From Snapdragon 8 onwards, Google Tensor G3 onwards, NVIDIA RTX 3000 series onwards. All relatively new . [1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d
- snvzz 11mo agoEven RISC-V vector assembly[0]. 0. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/-/issues/435 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/-/issues/435
- jeffparsons 11mo agoIt's possible without specific hardware acceleration, but murderous for mobile devices.
- eru 11mo agoIf you are on a mobile device, decoding without hardware assistance might not overwhelm the processors directly, but it might drain your battery unnecessarily fast?
- boterock 11mo agotv manufacturers don't want high end chips for their tv sets... hardware decoding is just a way to make cheaper chips for tvs.
- ls612 11mo agoOn a related note, why are release groups not putting out AV1 WEB-DLs? Most 4K stuff is h265 now but if AV1 is supplied without re-encoding surely that would be better?
- Dwedit 11mo agoBecause pirates are unaffected by the patent situation with H.265.
- ls612 11mo agoBut isn’t AV1 just better than h.265 now regardless of the patents? The only downside is limited compatibility.
- BlaDeKke 11mo agoEncoding my 40TB library to AV1 with software encoding without losing quality would take more then a year of not multiple years, consume lots of power while doing this, to save a little bit of storage. Granted, after a year of non stop encoding I would save a few TB of space. But it think it is cheaper to buy a new 20TB hard drive than the electricity used for the encoding.
- phantasmish 11mo agoI avoid av1 downloads when possible because I don’t want to have to figure out how to disable film grain synthesis and then deal with whatever damage that causes to apparent quality on a video that was encoded with it in mind. Like I just don’t want any encoding that supports that, if I can stay away from it.
- coppsilgold 11mo agoIn MPV it's just "F1 vf toggle format:film-grain=no" in the input config. And I prefer AV1 because of this, almost everything looks better without that noise. You can also include "vf=format:film-grain=no" in the config itself to start with no film grain by default.
- bofaGuy 11mo agoNetflix has been the worst performing and lowest quality video stream of any of the streaming services. Fuzzy video, lots of visual noise and artifacts. Just plan bad and this is on the 4k plan on 1GB fiber on a 4k Apple TV. I can literally tell when someone is watching Netflix without knowing because it looks like shit.
- mtoner23 11mo agoProbably some function of your location to data centers. I find hbo max to be aysmal these days. But I've learned to just stop caring about this stuff since no one else in my life does
- jiggawatts 11mo agohttps://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/ Now you can be mad about two things nobody else notices.
- odo1242 11mo agoThis is actually their DRM speaking. If you watch it on a Linux device or basically anything that isn’t a smart TV on the latest OS, they limit you to a 720p low bitrate stream, even if you pay for 4k. (See Louis Rossman’s video on the topic)
- jsheard 11mo agoOP said they're using an Apple TV, which most definitely supports the 4K DRM.
- array_key_first 11mo agoThe bit rate is unfortunately crushed to hell and back, leading to blockiness on 4K.
- odo1242 11mo agoOh oops
- beritdotdev 11mo ago[dead]
- badmonster 11mo ago[dead]
- conartist6 11mo agoFor a second there I wasn't looking very close and I thought it said that 30% of Netflix was running on .AVI files
- shmerl 11mo agoQualcomm seems to be lagging behind and doesn't have AV1 decoder except in high end SoCs.
- notatoad 11mo agoI understand that sometimes the HN titles get edited to be less descriptive and more generic in order to match the actual article title. What’s the logic with changing the title here from the actual article title it was originally submitted with “AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming” to the generic and not at all representative title it currently has “AV1: a modern open codec”? That is neither the article title nor representative of the article content.
- 7e 11mo agoAlso, it’s not the whole picture. AV1 is open because it didn’t have the good stuff (newly patented things) and as such I also wouldn’t say it’s the most modern.
- bawolff 11mo agoJust because something is patented doesn't necessarily mean its good. I think head to head comparisons matter more. (Admittedly i dont know how av1 holds up)
- parl_match 11mo agoYes, but in this case, it does. AV1 is good enough that the cost of not licensing might outweigh the cost of higher bandwidth. And it sounds like Netflix agrees with that.
- Sunspark 11mo agoI don't like newer codecs like AV1. I find them blurrier. Perhaps the bitrate is too low, but they do seem blurrier compared to h264. Even VP09 has often seemed better. h264 is a very good codec.
- parl_match 11mo agothey usually run newer codecs at a much lower bitrate, and do group testing to make sure the quality is "acceptable". in double blind testing, at the same bitrate, you'll pick the "new" codec every time. but yes, they're trying to save money on bandwidth. it's annoying
- endorphine 11mo agoIs it me or this post has LLM vibes?
- VerifiedReports 11mo agoI had forgotten about the film-grain extraction, which is a clever approach to a huge problem for compression. But... did I miss it, or was there no mention of any tool to specify grain parameters up front? If you're shooting "clean" digital footage and you decide in post that you want to add grain, how do you convey the grain parameters to the encoder? It would degrade your work and defeat some of the purpose of this clever scheme if you had to add fake grain to your original footage, feed the grainy footage to the encoder to have it analyzed for its characteristics and stripped out (inevitably degrading real image details at least a bit), and then have the grain re-added on delivery. So you need a way to specify grain characteristics to the encoder directly, so clean footage can be delivered without degradation and grain applied to it upon rendering at the client.
- crazygringo 11mo agoYou just add it to your original footage, and accept whatever quality degradation that grain inherently provides. Any movie or TV show is ultimately going to be streamed in lots of different formats. And when grain is added, it's often on a per-shot basis, not uniformly. E.g. flashback scenes will have more grain. Or darker scenes will have more grain added to emulate film. Trying to tie it to the particular codec would be a crazy headache. For a solo project it could be doable but I can't ever imagine a streamer building a source material pipeline that would handle that.
- VerifiedReports 11mo agoMmmm, no, because if the delivery conduit uses AV1, you can optimize for it and realize better quality by avoiding the whole degrading round of grain analysis and stripping. "I can't ever imagine a streamer building a source material pipeline that would handle that." That's exactly what the article describes, though. It's already built, and Netflix is championing this delivery mechanism. Netflix is also famous for dictating technical requirements for source material. Why would they not want the director to be able to provide a delivery-ready master that skips the whole grain-analysis/grain-removal step and provides the best possible image quality? Presumably the grain extraction/re-adding mechanism described here handles variable grain throughout the program. I don't know why you'd assume that it doesn't. If it didn't, you'd wind up with a single grain level for the entire movie; an entirely unacceptable result for the very reason you mention. This scheme loses a major opportunity for new productions unless the director can provide a clean master and an accompanying "grain track." Call it a GDL: grain decision list. This would also be future-proof; if a new codec is devised that also supports this grain layer, the parameters could be translated from the previous master into the new codec. I wish Netflix could go back and remove the hideous soft-focus filtration from The West Wing, but nope; that's baked into the footage forever.
- aperture147 11mo agoAV1 is not new anymore and I think most of the modern devices are supporting them natively. Some devices like Apple even have a dedicated AV1 HW-accelerator. Netflix has pushing AV1 for a while now so I thought that the adoption rate should be like 50%, but it seems like AV1 requires better hardware and newer software which a lot of people don't have.
- smallstepforman 11mo agoDont forget that people also view Netflix on TV’s, and a large number of physical TV’s were made before AV1 was specced. So 30% overall may also mean 70% on modern devices.
- brnt 11mo ago> AV1 is not new anymore Uh what. (Embedded) hardware lasts a long time (and it should!). TV's around the globe are not all built after 2018. H264 is still the gold standard if you want to be sure a random device has hardware acceleration. I make use of this by taking a USB hard drive with me on trips. Random TV's rarely have issue with my H264 catalogue. It'll be a while before I look at AV1 for this. Sure, I wish I could benefit faster, but I don't want people to throw out perfectly good hardware either!
- beritdotdev 11mo ago[dead]
- shanemhansen 11mo ago> AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores¹ that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions. At the same time, AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC, resulting in 45% fewer buffering interruptions. Just thought I'd extract the part I found interesting as a performance engineer.
- slhck 11mo agoThis VMAF comparison is to be taken with a grain of salt. Netflix' primary goal was to reduce the bitrate consumption, as can be seen, while roughly keeping the same nominal quality of the stream. This means that, ignoring all other factors and limitations of H.264 with higher resolutions, VMAF scores for all their streaming sessions should roughly be the same, or in a comparable range, because that's what they're optimizing for. (See the Dynamic Optimizer Framework they have publicly posted a few years ago.) Still impressive numbers, of course.
- forgotpwd16 11mo agoAm I the only one that thought this is an old article by the title? AV1 is now 10 years old and AV2 has been announced for year-end release few months ago. If anything the news is that AV1 powers only 30% by now. At least HEVC, released about the same time, has gotten quite popular in warez scene (movies/TV/anime) for small encodes, whereas AV1 releases are still considered a rarity. (Though to be fair 30% Netflix & YT means AV1 usage in total is much higher.) Will've expected a royalty-free codec to've been embraced more but seems its difficulty for long time to be played on low power devices hindered its adoption.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago> At Netflix, our top priority is delivering the best possible entertainment experience to our members. I dont think that is true of any streamers. Otherwise they wouldnt provide the UI equivalent of a shopping centre that tries to get you lost and unable to find your way out.
- sen 11mo agoOr compression that makes a streamed 4K video look worse than a 1080p video played locally.
- _puk 11mo agoI imagine that's a big part of the drive behind discontinuing Chromecast support.. https://www.androidcentral.com/streaming-tv/chromecast/netflix-starts-pulling-back-chromecast-support https://www.androidcentral.com/streaming-tv/chromecast/netfl...
- StrLght 11mo agoI doubt that. Netflix has an app on TVs as old as 8-10 years now. SoCs in such TVs aren't enough to decode AV1. They're stuck with H.264 for a long time.
- kotaKat 11mo agoNah, that's more "we can't get ad injection working on the old Chromecast client" because it still works on early Chromecasts for ad-free plans.
- davidmurdoch 11mo agoI can't figure out an answer to why they'd do this. They're still supporting their custom Chromecast "receiver" app (for now?), which is a standard HTML app. But now they're detecting the Chromecast-capable device model, looking it up in an allowlist, then conditionally showing the device in the Netflix App's Cast UI. This would mean if you have a new device and an old device in the same network the Netflix app might show only your old device! What? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what they've done here?
- csuleiw 11mo ago[dead]
- csuleiw 11mo ago[dead]
- vitorgrs 11mo agoWeirdly, Netflix on my Samsung TV it's been a few months it's using only H264. Not AV1. When they first launched AV1, it worked there... Honestly not complaining, because they were using AV1 with 800-900~kbps for 1080p content, which is clearly not enough compared to their 6Mbps h.264 bitrate.
- SG- 11mo agothey may have determined the decoding of av1 was too poor or that software decoding av1 wasn't a good idea.
- techpression 11mo agoCompression is great and all, but Netflix is overdoing it and their content looks like an over-sharpened mess with lego blocks in high intensity scenes. And no, it's not my connection, Apple TV does it far better and so does Prime. It's really sad that most people never get to experience a good 4K Blu-ray, where the grain is actually part of the image as mastered and there's enough bitrate to not rely on sharpening.
- liampulles 11mo agoI'm a hobbiest video encoder (mostly I like to experiment in backing up my DVD collection), and I recently switched to using AV1 over HEVC. I've found the ratio of a fixed quality vs CPU load to be better, and I've found it is reasonably good at retaining detail over smoothing things out when compared to HEVC. And the ability to add generated "pseudo grain" works pretty well to give the perception of detail. The performance of GPU encoders (while still not good enough fory maybe stringent standards) is better.
- testdelacc1 11mo agoSomething doesn’t quite add up to me. The post says “AV1 powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing”. Impressive, but I’m wondering why it isn’t higher? I’m guessing most devices should support AV1 software decoders. 88% of devices in certified in the last 4 years support AV1, all browsers support AV1 software decoding, Netflix apps on Android (since 2021) and iOS (since 2023) obviously do. So why isn’t it AV1 higher? The post doesn’t say, so we can only speculate. It feels like they’re preferring hardware decoding to software decoding, even if it’s an older codec. If this is true, it would make sense - it’s better for the client’s power and battery consumption. But then why start work on AV2 before AV1 has even reached a majority of devices? I’m sure they have the answer but they’re not sharing here.
- jhugo 11mo agoSmart TVs, TV sticks, and a lot of mobile devices will not be capable of decoding AV1 in software in realtime, given their low-spec CPUs. I imagine that Netflix is only serving AV1 to devices with hardware decoding support.
- philipallstar 11mo agoThis is a great result from Google, Netflix, Cisco, etc.
- ksec 11mo agoWorth a note, H.264 High Profile is patent free in most countries and soon be patent free too in US.
- sylware 11mo agoIsn't AV1 on the level of H.265? And are H.265 and the future H.266(will face the upcoming av2) free of charge forever and wherever like av[12]? They could do the Big Tech way: make it all 'free' for a good while, estinguish/calm down any serious competition, then make them not 'free' anymore. In the end, you cannot trust them.
- adzm 11mo agoVP9 is more on the level of H265 really. VVC/H266 is closer to AV1. It's not an exact comparison but it is close. The licensing is just awful for VVC similar to HEVC and now that AV1 has proved itself everyone is pivoting away from VVC/h266 especially on the consumer side. Pretty much all VVC adoption is entirely internal (studios, set top boxes, etc) and it is not used by any major consumer streaming service afaik.
- ksec 11mo agoI guess most people forgot about x264 dark shikari's post already. VP9 isn't H.265 level. That is the marketing spin of AOM. And even AOM members admit VVC is better than AV1. Liking one codec or whether it is royalty free is one thing, whether it is performing better is another thing.
- adzm 11mo agoI'm well aware of dark shikari. While there are obvious differences technologically and subjectively, on a generational level vp9 and HEVC are both positioned as h264 successors. We all know h264 is brilliant and flexible and very capable. Many companies were looking for an alternative with better licensing; on2's vp8 was Google's first push, but it still lagged behind h264, even though it used many of the same concepts and limitations. Vp9 and HEVC were certainly the next generation and competed with each other directly, really. Among the larger consumer video services, many keep h264 for compatibility, and reserve higher quality or resolutions or frame rates for the newer codecs. tiktok eventually settled on HEVC as its preferred codec, while Instagram used HEVC for a short while before migrating entirely to vp9. Other developers ran into a ton of issues with licensing HEVC for their own software which is still a complete pain. Anyway, people are now looking at what's next. VVC came out quite a while ago, and AV1 more recently, but when people are looking for the current sota codec with at least some good support, they end up choosing between the two, realistically. And yeah, VVC has advantages over AV1 and they are very different technically. But the market has pretty loudly spoken that VVC is a hassle no one wants to mess with, and AV1 is quickly becoming the ubiquitous codec with the closest rival VVC offering little to offset the licensing troubles (and lack of hardware support at this point as well) Anyway, just saying. VVC is a huge pain. HEVC still is a huge pain, and though I prefer it to vp9 and it has much better quality and capabilities, the licensing issue makes it troublesome in so many ways. But the choice almost always comes down to vp9 or HEVC, then AV1 or VVC. Though at this point it might as well be, in order, h264, vp9, HEVC, AV1, and no one really cares about VVC.
- TMWNN 11mo agoThe one big hardware deficiency of my Nvidia Shield TV is its lack of YouTube AV1 support.
- nicman23 11mo agoPlease Sir, can I have some more bitrate?
- 7e 11mo agoCongrats, you invented a codec five years after H.265 which is very cheap, but inferior to state of the art. Meanwhile, Apple will eventually add hardware support for VVC and retain the best user experience for 8K and beyond.