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Wow. 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
by crazygringo 11mo ago
Wow. 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.
- tux3 11mo agoWhy, the patent office did. There are many ideas that cannot be reinvented for the next few decades, and thanks to submarine patents it is simply not safe to innovate without your own small regiment of lawers. This is a big victory for the patent system.
- Dylan16807 11mo agoThe patent office getting $100k or whatever doesn't sound like a win for them either. I'm not sure what you mean by "patent system" having a victory here, but it's not that the goal of promoting innovation is happening.
- gary_0 11mo agoMBAs got to make deals and lawyers got to file lawsuits. Everyone else got to give them money. God bless the bureaucracy.
- TitaRusell 11mo agoFor smart TVs Netflix is obviously a very important partner.
- kevincox 11mo agoIf it has a five year start and we've seen almost zero hardware shipping that is a pretty bad sign. IIRC AV1 decoding hardware started shipping within a year of the bitstream being finalized. (Encoding took quite a bit longer but that is pretty reasonable)
- jsheard 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding#Hardwar... Yeah, that's... sparse uptake. A few smart TV SOCs have it, but aside from Intel it seems that none of the major computer or mobile vendors are bothering. AV2 next it is then!
- adzm 11mo agoVVC is pretty much a dead end at this point. Hardly anyone is using it; it's benefits over AV1 are extremely minimal and no one wants the royalty headache. Basically everyone learned their lesson with HEVC.
- ksec 11mo agoIt is being used in China and India for Streaming. Brazil chose it with LCEVC for their TV 3.0. Broadcasting industry is also preparing for VVC. So it is not popular as in Web and Internet is usage, but it is certainly not dead. I am eagerly awaiting for AV2 test results.
- adzm 11mo agoRight, I know some studios have used it for high quality/resolution/framerate exports too, so it is definitely not dead. But still a dead end, from everything I've seen. No one seems to want to bother with it unless it is already within the entire pipeline. Every project I've seen that worked with it that went to consumers or editors ended up running into issues of some sort that they ended up using something else entirely and any VVC support basically abandoned or deprecated. It's a shame because VVC really is pretty awesome, but the only people using it seem to be those that adopted it earlier assuming broader support that never materialized.
- Sunspark 11mo agoChina and India are two-thirds of the human race. With population numbers like those, this is large scale adoption.. just not in our market.
- cyberlimerence 11mo agoYour math is way off, China and India combined are roughly 35 %.
- txtsd 11mo agoCan you provide a source for India using it? I've heard nothing of the sort.
- shmerl 11mo agoWhen even H.265 is being dropped by the likes of Dell, adoption of H.266 will be even worse making it basically DOA for anything promising. It's plagued by the same problems H.265 is.
- SG- 11mo agoDell is significant in the streaming and media world?
- close04 11mo agoDell and HP are significant in the "devices" world and they just dropped the support for HEVC hardware encoding/decoding [1] to save a few cents per device. You can still pay for the Microsoft add-in that does this. It's not just streaming, your Teams background blur was handled like that. Eventually people and companies will associate HEVC with "that thing that costs extra to work", and software developers will start targeting AV1/2 so their software performance isn't depending on whether the laptop manufacturer or user paid for the HEVC license. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-...
- nolok 11mo agoOn the same line, Synology dropped it on their NAS too (for their video, media etc ... Even thumbnails, they ask the sender device to generate one locally and send it, the NAS won't do it anymore for HEVC)
- shmerl 11mo agoAlso you can just use Linux, Dell / HP have no control over the actual GPU for that, I think they just disabled it in Windows level. Linux has no gatekeepers for that and you can use your GPU as you want. But this just indicates that HEVC etc. is a dead end anyway.
- danudey 11mo agoDell is dropping it to save 4 cents per device, so users will have to pay $1 to Microsoft per user instead. Go figure.
- lambdaone 11mo agoAV2's mission is to nip VVC in the bud. They seem to be more or less at parity, and given that, why would anyone want to use a royalty-based codec when they could could use an essentially equivalent free one? There's no massive hurry to implement either - we have existing codecs that are largely good enough for now - this is technology which take 5 to 10 years to fully deploy, as has been seen with other codecs.
- hulitu 11mo ago> Hopefully AV2. This is so 90's. Why not AV2026 or AV26.0 ? /s
- dylan604 11mo agohow does that mean "~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware encoding"? I'm guessing you meant hardware decoding???
- crazygringo 11mo agoWhoops, thanks. Fixed.
- dehrmann 11mo agoNot trolling, but I'd bet something that's augmented with generative AI. Not to the level of describing scenes with words, but context-aware interpolation.
- randall 11mo agofor sure. macroblock hinting seems like a good place for research.
- km3r 11mo agohttps://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/rtx-video-super-resolution/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/rtx-video-super-resolution/ We already have some of the stepping stones for this. But honestly much better for upscaling poor quality streams vs just gives things a weird feeling when it is a better quality stream.
- afiori 11mo agoAI embeddings can be seen as a very advanced form of lossy compression
- mort96 11mo agoI don't want my video decoder inventing details which aren't there. I much rather want obvious compression artifacts than a codec where the "compression artifacts" look like perfectly realistic, high-quality hallucinated details.
- cubefox 11mo agoIn case of many textures (grass, sand, hair, skin etc) it makes little difference whether the high frequency details are reproduced exactly or hallucinated. E.g. it doesn't matter whether the 1262nd blade of grass from the left side is bending to the left or to the right.
- mort96 11mo agoAnd in the case of many others, it makes a very significant difference. And a codec doesn't have enough information to know. Imagine a criminal investigation. A witness happened to take a video as the perpetrator did the crime. In the video, you can clearly see a recognizable detail on the perpetrator's body in high quality; a birthmark perhaps. This rules out the main suspect -- but can we trust that the birthmark actually exists and isn't hallucinated? Would a non-AI codec have just showed a clearly compression-artifact-looking blob of pixels which can't be determined one way or the other? Or would a non-AI codec have contained actual image data of the birth mark in sufficient detail? Using AI to introduce realistic-looking details where there was none before (which is what your proposed AI codec inherently does) should never happen automatically.
- snvzz 11mo ago>So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support That'd be h264 (associated patents expired in most of the world), vp9 and av1. h265 aka HEVC is less common due to dodgy, abusive licensing. Some vendors even disable it with drivers despite hardware support because it is nothing but legal trouble.
- ladyanita22 11mo agoI have the feeling that H265 is more prevalent than VP9
- seabrookmx 11mo agoYouTube uses VP9 so it depends if you're talking "number of applications that use it" or "number of hours watched".
- thrdbndndn 11mo agoI'm not too surprised. It's similar to the metric that "XX% of Internet is on IPv6" -- it's almost entirely driven by mobile devices, specifically phones. As soon as both mainstream Android and iPhones support it, the adoption of AV1 should be very 'easy'. (And yes, even for something like Netflix lots of people consume it with phones.)
- 0manrho 11mo ago> To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding Where did it say that? > AV1 powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing Is admittedly a bit non-specific, it could be interpreted as 30% of users or 30% of hours-of-video-streamed, which are very different metrics. If 5% of your users are using AV1, but that 5% watches far above the average, you can have a minority userbase with an outsized representation in hours viewed. I'm not saying that's the case, just giving an example of how it doesn't necessarily translate to 30% of devices using Netflix supporting AV1. Also, the blog post identifies that there is an effective/efficient software decoder, which allows people without hardware acceleration to still view AV1 media in some cases (the case they defined was Android based phones). So that kinda complicates what "X% of devices support AV1 playback," as it doesn't necessarily mean they have hardware decoding.
- sophiebits 11mo ago“30% of viewing” I think clearly means either time played or items played. I’ve never worked with a data team that would possibly write that and mean users. If it was a stat about users they’d say “of users”, “of members”, “of active watchers”, or similar. If they wanted to be ambiguous they’d say “has reached 30% adoption” or something.
- 0manrho 11mo agoAgreed, but this is the internet, the ultimate domain of pedantry, and they didn't say it explicitly, so I'm not going to put words in their mouth just to have a circular discussion about why I'm claiming they said something they didn't technically say, which is why I asked "Where did it say that" at the very top. Also, either way, my point was and still stands: it doesn't say 30% of devices have hardware encoding.
- csdreamer7 11mo agoI am not in data science so I can not validate your comment, but 30% of viewing I would assume mean users or unique/discreet viewing sessions and not watched minutes. I would appreciate it if Netflix would clarify.
- 11mo ago
- vitorgrs 11mo agoI mean... I bought a Samsung TV in 2020, and it already supported AV1 HW decoding. 2020 feels close, but that's 5 years.
- cubefox 11mo agoTwo years ago I bought a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 phone (TSMC 4nm, with 12 GB LPDDR RAM, 256 GB NAND flash, and a 200 megapixel camera). It still feels pretty modern but it has no AV1 support.
- usrusr 11mo agoIs that supposed to be long-lived for a TV? I'm running an LG initially released in 2013 and the only thing I'm not happy with is that about a year ago Netflix ended their app for that hardware generation (likely for phasing out whatever codec it used). Now I'm running that unit behind an Amazon fire stick and the user experience is so much worse. (that LG was a "smart" TV from before they started enshittifying, such a delight - had to use and set up a recent LG once on a family visit and it was even worse than the fire stick, omg, so much worse!)
- windexh8er 11mo agoIf, by chance, you're not running the latest version RootMyTV [0] may be an option. Or downgrade might still be an option [1]. [0] https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io [1] https://github.com/throwaway96/downgr8 https://github.com/throwaway96/downgr8
- StilesCrisis 11mo agoFire Stick is the most enshittified device (which is why it was so cheap). AppleTV is fantastic if you're willing to spend $100. You don't need the latest gen; previous gen are just as good.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago> Is that supposed to be long-lived for a TV? I don't see anything in that comment implying such a thing. It's just about the uptake of decoders.
- alex_duf 11mo agoThat's not at all how I read it. They mentioned they delivered a software decoder on android first, then they also targeted web browsers (presumably through wasm). So out of these 30%, a good chunk of it is software not hardware. That being said, it's a pretty compelling argument for phone and tv manufacturers to get their act together, as Apple has already done.
- danudey 11mo agoThis is something that infuriates me to no end - companies forcing software decoding on my devices rather than shipping me a codec my device supports. When I'm watching something on YouTube on my iPhone, they're usually shipping me something like VP9 video which requires a software decoder; on a sick day stuck in bed I can burn through ten percent of my battery in thirty minutes. Meanwhile, if I'm streaming from Plex, all of my media is h264 or h265 and I can watch for hours on the same battery life.
- Sunspark 11mo agoAnother example of why Android is better for this use case. With Firefox for Android you can install an extension to force h264 from YouTube and the problem is solved. With iPhone, you cannot. You must buy a new device when you need a feature or support.
- mort96 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, we can just stay on AV1 for a long while. I don't feel any need to obsolete all the hardware that's now finally getting hardware decoding support for AV1.
- hulitu 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? Continous improvement ? CADT ? What shall the next one bring ? Free meals ?