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A few things - this is one step in a long, LONG path. AV2 is currently unusable in its current state (the encoder typically runs at around 1fps on good hardware
by jjcm 5mo ago
A few things - this is one step in a long, LONG path. AV2 is currently unusable in its current state (the encoder typically runs at around 1fps on good hardware), and likely will remain so til ~2028 when the first av2 hardware accelerated chips start dropping. Even then, I wouldn't expect AV2 streams to be common til 2030.
IMO, if it were just the efficiency gains on the table (which are substantial - ~20-30% over AV1), I'd say that AV2 isn't worth it. The biggest thing it does add though is multi-stream support, which will be a big win for VR and live sports. The other fun thing is you can send an alpha channel as a separate stream, which the file will then composite for proper transparent video support.
- miohtama 5mo agoIn HW accelerated chips, what part of the calculations they usually accelerate? Could it be possible to repurpose old HW?
- boriskourt 5mo agoOne of the biggest gains of having dedicated hardware is that the computation doesn’t happen on the general hardware. This is what makes it viable on mobile devices where system responsiveness and power efficiency are high priority. Generally these hardware decoders haven’t been retoolalble.
- BillStrong 5mo agoEssentially all of the processing of the video data, barring the container format which the CPU uses to know what part of the data to send to the GPU or the Audio chip or codec. And HW acceleration is generally a preset baked in version of the encoder or decoder. These are mostly codec specific. So, no using hardware from previous versions. Now, you can see some software that tries to use the GPU itself, instead of the dedicated hardware acceleration, to decode, but that isn't the HW accelerated, and may not operate in real time. At the same time, that will consume much more power, eliminating some of the advantages or the pure HW rendition, especially important for mobile. I could see an argument being made for encoding, if it is 2x or faster than the CPU, but I haven't looked at any in a while, so don't know the speeds.
- cyberax 5mo agoTypically things like quantization and motion estimation.
- adgjlsfhk1 5mo agoBased on AV1's trajectory, hardware encode isn't necessary (though it is nice). The current encoder is a reference encoder. Now that the spec is finalized, expect significant speed improvements from production encoders (realtime likely won't happen until we get it in hardware though)
- Gigachad 5mo agoHardware encode is required if you want things like video calls, camera recording and such to use it. It isn’t required for content distribution platforms which aren’t realtime and the cost of encode is easily made up by hundreds of thousands of streams.
- Orphis 5mo agoOne of the interesting usage of AV1 was specifically for low bitrate calls, and software encoding was perfectly fine, even on mobile. With low enough resolution, framerate and bitrate, you can get a quality stream without significant encoding artifacts compared to any other codec. It is in production right now and has been for a while. The tradeoff CPU / bandwidth is quite advantageous in situations like this. And no, AV1 HW encoders cannot usually be used, they are not designed for a tight bitrate control or realtime communications like software encoding is usually.
- ksec 5mo agoHave you said this for Audio Codec I would have agreed. I do not know a single Smartphone Video Conferencing software that uses CPU encoding rather than hardware encoding. Neither WhatsApp or FaceTime, perhaps the largest of the two real time Video Call uses AV1.
- dannyw 5mo agoYeah, no production or large scale VC system is running software AV1 encoders on smartphones. You will drain a full phone battery in 1-2 hours of calls. It just doesn’t make sense and will result in extraordinary power/battery drainage at best, or output that’s worse than hardware encoding. The only way you could get AV1 to software encode in realtime AND low latency on a mid-range Android chip is by disabling or skipping nearly all of the compression/encoding features that make it good at low bitrate.
- dgreensp 5mo agoWhere do you see information about the efficiency gains over AV1?
- tom_alexander 5mo agoIt's at the end on the conclusion slide @24:40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8E_SUlU3w&t=1480 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8E_SUlU3w&t=1480
- shmerl 5mo agoThat's fine and not anything new for codecs, they always take a long time before mass adoption. Take a look at AV1 itself, you can't even say it's really ubiquitous on all hardware. It's quite well along in adoption compared to early days, but some mobile devices are still lacking hardware acceleration for it.
- BillStrong 5mo agoIt is still ironic to me that my Steam Deck has decode AV1 acceleration, on a really old CPU/GPU combo.
- d--b 5mo agoDoes anyone know what is so costly to calculate in AV2?
- ZeroGravitas 5mo agoIn general they just increase the numbers on everything when they go up a generation. e.g. if you check in 4 directions to see if you can reuse a chunk then make it check in 8 or 16. Faster encoders will have smart heuristics on when to use these new abilities and when to skip them but the reference encoder will try everything in a dumb way to eke out a tiny win to maximize a theoretical advantage and map out the extreme best case.
- xbmcuser 5mo agoThe way things are going, we can pretty much forget about AV2 hardware encoders in PCs anytime soon. All the newest, best chip capacity is being completely hogged by Apple and AI companies. Unless chipmakers port the AV2 design to older, cheaper nodes, it’s just not happening for average users. We’ll probably see some Chinese TV chip makers throw in an AV2 decoder just to check a box, but as an actual encoder? I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
- Gigachad 5mo agoPCs don’t need hardware encoders. There are no realtime jobs on these. You can let it encode in however long it takes. You need hardware encoders for things like cameras because they need to encode in real time since the buffer would quickly overflow otherwise.
- circuit10 5mo agoUse cases for hardware encoders in PCs: - Video calls - Screen/webcam recording - Live streaming - Real-time transcoding for media servers (don’t know much about this but I’ve heard it’s a thing) - Game streaming - Video editing (making exporting less frustrating)
- sylware 5mo agoEverything here is really niche, except video calls (and even that...). In other words, unless on smart phones, don't expect broadly distributed AV2 encoding hardware. If it does happen on PC, it will be most likely some courtesy of the hardware chip designers.
- circuit10 5mo agoScreen recording is not niche, anyone who works remotely probably does video calls daily and the others are somewhat more niche but I'd guess that at least 50-70% of people do at least one of these things
- Bombthecat 5mo agoI feel like in 2030 it's more likely that we send 480p and just upscale with ai on the other end
- hulitu 5mo ago480p ? More like 200i. There's a race to the bottom driven by those "up to" codecs.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago> The biggest thing it does add though is multi-stream support, which will be a big win for VR and live sports. AV1 supports it too ?
- ksec 5mo ago>........I'd say that AV2 isn't worth it. Unless they have hardware encoder and decoder design done in parallel, otherwise it would be 2028 before a hardware block design is done and 2030 for the earliest product to ship with it. In reality I think 2031 or 2032 is more likely. And I have been saying the same for quite some time that 20-30% for a generational codec improvement isn't worth it. I think they originally aimed at 50%, and then 40% and then 30%.
- nubinetwork 5mo ago> enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates > likely will remain so til ~2028 when the first av2 hardware accelerated chips start dropping This might sound dumb, but whats the point if its intended for slower devices, but those slower devices don't even exist yet?
- rovr138 5mo agoso that new devices can adopt it They can't adopt it if it doesn't exist.
- nubinetwork 5mo agoAnd what about old devices? I'm sure someone out there is still using an s5 as a daily driver... Future proofing is great and all, but 240p on modern devices looks like trash, even worse than tube tv.
- Gigachad 5mo ago240p for someone’s webcam thumbnail in Microsoft teams is perfectly sufficient though.
- rovr138 5mo agoThey can keep using whatever they're currently using. This doesn't take away anything. It's a new standard. Based on your argument, one should add new safety standards to cars like seat belts, because old cars might not have them.
- nubinetwork 5mo agoTo be fair, some municipalities do actually require old cars to be fitted with seatbelts... air bags, not so much, because apparently changing a steering column is too hard?
- rovr138 5mo ago
- po1nt 5mo agoLooking at how GPU development has been sidetracked for NPU, I worry that this is 2035 target at best. Manufacturers will push for maximising matrix operation silicon area. In the era of trillion dollar investments into datacenters, traffic cost is afterthought. The only benefitors might be YouTube, Netflix and such, but on their scale investment into ISP level caches might be cheaper.
- cyberax 5mo ago> The biggest thing it does add though is multi-stream support This was supported in H.264 MVC but only saw real use for 3D movies on physical BluRays. With almost no content available outside that.
- kalleboo 5mo ago> The biggest thing it does add though is multi-stream support I would have thought this would be a part of the container format rather than the video codec?
- xmichael909 5mo agoGoogle H264 SVC
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo agoI feel like these encoders that require acceleration are a big reason why good hardware obsoletes so quickly.