DASH playback of AV1 video in Firefox
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
Two ends of a WebRTC connection could even negotiate codecs based on power/processing needs, with one sending a WebAssembly codec to the other as a fallback if needed ("hey you don't support this thing that I support in hardware, but you are plugged in, so burn some more electrons on your end").
WebAssembly SIMD [1] will definitely help with performance here.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
https://github.com/WebAssembly/simd/blob/master/proposals/si...
Completely unrealistic, but it would be interesting to have on the fly reprogramable FPGAs on die that can be assigned specific tasks on demand. This of course has tons of risks, but the pace that hardware moves is painful.
Worse yet, most Chromecasts and TVs don't support anything newer than H.264. It will be years before H.265 or any new competitor sees hardware support in most homes.
Now with H265, Bluray 4k profile is important, ergo 10 bit support is mandatory, as well as display output itself being able to handle signalling for Rec2020 HDR10 over HDMI 2.x (or equivalent DP).
I've always wanted this! "Hardware accelerated" would become a thing of the past, because everything could hardware accelerate itself. It would probably be more like ram than a graphics card, though, and could probably be designed so each application could specify how many gates it wants.
> This of course has tons of risks
Like what?
Oh great, one more thing to help ad networks to crank CPU usage of my browser to the extremes. Hope I'll be able to also disable that through about:config. :/
I have a n00b question though. How would I display the video in the browser using webassembly ? I mean using webassembly, I can do the decoding of the bits in the stream. But how to display those bits in the browser ? Do I use a canvas and directly dump the pixel buffer there ?
The project was based on Google's VP10 and Xiph's Daala.
The codec will be open and royalty-free.
The difference is AV1 will be here before MPEG-LA's next codec, and now virtually all chipmakers will support it within 8-12 months of the final spec being released, instead of having Google beg chip companies for the next 2-3 years to implement its codec with small/moderate success.
Additionally, I don't think anyone will want to pay MPEG-LA for its next codec, just because it shares a name with h.265.
H.264 was driven by 1080p. H.265 was driven by 4K.
What's the killer use case for AV1 or H.266 ?
The evisceration of net neutrality creating a clear market incentive to reduce 4K video bandwidth by 30%. :P
AV1 can be implemented with free software everywhere. No more leaning on H.264 where you are arbitrarily disallowed from using H.265, not to mention when you are also disallowed from using H.264!
AV1 will outperform H.265, even at low resolutions and framerates. That coupled with free software compatibility, and support from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA means that it will have great hardware and software support everywhere.
AV1 won't outperform H.265 when there is no hardware support for it. That's the whole issue here. AV1 is dead when you have major platforms not supporting it e.g. iOS, OSX, PS4, XBox and almost every photo camera.
{{By whom}}
VP9 is out and widely deployed now, yet no patent litigation has ensued. Meanwhile, there are now three patent pools demanding license fees for HEVC, with the latest one appearing just months ago. If you fear litigation, one option sure seems a lot safer.
This codec is developed by the Alliance for Open Media, whose goal is to provide a patent-free video codec (more acurately, a video codec under a patent-umbrella protection). Let's not reproduce the HEVC fiasco (see "HEVC advance licensing terms" for more info).
AV1 is still in development at this time (the bitstream format changes slightly almost every day). However, the compression performance (VQ) is already very good ; and lots of huge companies are part of the Alliance ( Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Mozilla, ... see http://aomedia.org/about-us/ )
Apple is free to continue to devalue their products by refusing to support features, just as its customers are free to spend their money elsewhere.
> And then there we go again transcoding and adding software layers to make it work for everyone.
If that is what you want to do, that will work. If users want to support a platform that limits them to lesser quality, let them. Be explicit about why they are getting lesser quality.
Your software is not part of the Apple ecosystem, Apple is part of your software's ecosystem.
It is only so much, that the clients are willing to invest extra into Safari, iPhones and iPads notwithstanding.
Nobody is going to wait for them.
You cannot open Opus stream in Quicktime, or in Quick Preview in Finder, for example. Or even play web stream in Safari, like you can with AAC.
I thought that AV1 is going to be the Opus of video codecs, but with the encoding being so compute intensive, how to you plan to tackle the problem?
AV1 has heavy interest from hardware companies: AMD. ARM, Broadcom, Intel, NVIDIA, and Realtek, among others are already members [0].
H.265 hardware decoding has been shipping for at least a year on major platforms. All of those companies you listed ship H.265 hardware today. And then you have companies like Apple and Sony who are H.265 only.
You are free to pay extra license fees for H.265 anyway. Your competition will not.
And the competition are all part of H.265 as well e.g. Microsoft, Intel.
Even if you are patent holder, you still have to pay and then you will receive back your share. It doesn't mean it is free for you.
On the content producer side, while MPEG LA waives fees there, HEVC Advance does not. If you are not fta broadcast/cable/sat tv provider or free-to-user streaming provider, you are going to cash up per title or subscriber/month.
So in competition, I meant yours. If you are providing a non-free video content, and you insist on HEVC, it is going to cost you. Your competition with VP9 or AV1 won't have this cost.
I can pretty much imagine, that those using devices without VP9/AV1 support will be relegated either to software decoding, or will have to pay premium for their hw accelerated stream.
Don't forget Velos Media (the third one!).
(Also, down-votes for asking a relevant question. Classy crowd here...)
I spend most of my time developing (server) software in Mac OS, and I'd rather do it in Linux, since it seems obviously more suited to it. I'm glad I don't have to do it in Windows, since it seems obviously less suited to it.
But it's all minor stuff. Overall it's all fine.
That being said, its worth it to swap a T460 trackpad in to get a decent trackpad. IIRC they're sub-$15.
And H.265 has been the industry standard for a number of years now shipping in hardware from Intel, Nvidia, GoPro, Sony etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#2...
On the contrary, we know that nobody has tried to set up a patent pool for VP9 or otherwise ask for royalties. On the other hand, new patent pools for HEVC keep popping up. You could pay one and then be asked to pay another. https://blog.streamingmedia.com/2017/05/velos-media-hevc-pat...
Or watch TV in Europe or Japan.
H.265 has been ahead for a number of years so obviously quite a few products exclusively support it.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/201...
[2] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
Not sure why you brought up Edge and Android TVs.
[1] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/review.php?id=1482404506&subact...
[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/xbox-scorpio-engine-soc-det...
The number of companies supporting H.265 far exceeds AV1/VP9 and the biggest wildcard is: Apple. You simply can't have a codec that doesn't work on iOS or OSX. End of story. And you already know who has won by looking at torrent sites which have almost zero AV1/VP9 content but lots of H.265.
And we already know that VP8 was riddled with patent infringements and ended up getting a license from MPEG-LA. VP9 has not yet been tested in this respect and could easily require royalties from implementers in the future.
And Apple is a patent contributor to H.265 so zero chance of adopting VP9.
Lots of Alliance companies also helped develop and have patents on H.265, it shouldn't be an obstacle to shipping AV1.
(edit: Currently DVB-T2 is only free for open senders (ARD, ZDF, senders which are paid by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", the rest costs money. it's not in wide use and probably never will Astra Sat / Eutelsat or cable (DVB-S2/DVB-C which all only use H.264) is probably the way which most people go, after the DVB-T debacle. And heck even than H.264/H.265 is implemented by DVB-T2 vendors but DVB-T2 does not need H.264/H.265 it can be used with AV1 aswell.)
> While Opus was adopted as a mandatory format for the WebRTC wire protocol, we don’t have a similar mandate for a video codec.
Now if we could play audio in all browsers using Opus. Even Apple started supporting Opus, but being Apple they messed things up and you can't use Ogg container there :(
Edit: I think the GPU usage was high due to using WebRender