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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions that AV1 is slow. I seem to remember that H.264 was painfully slow in the beginning. Is this simply a matter of waiting for hardware to add support for AV1? Or does someone need to sit down at the spinning wheel and write some assembly?

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Both.

All of the software optimization isn't necessarily ASM though, but just being more clever about how you explore the search-space of encoding options.

Yes, the h.264 and hevc reference implementations are also terribly slow and alternative implementations with performance optimizations, tradeoffs and additional encoding features were developed over long time spans.

The bitstream formats provide enough flexibility for the encoders to go beyond what the reference implementation does.

Software encoders provide the best quality, hardware encoders are kind of meh but do their job in a low power envelope.

Well, yes, the reference implementation are, reference implementation. But h.264 and HEVC Ref Encoder and let say X26x encoder were only a difference of 10 - 50 times.

Av1, we are taking about 1000x.

Probably a bit of both. H.264 hardware encoding is generally available, but it's more used for real-time communication (Skype, etc) or places where software encoding isn't viable (mobile devices with power limitations) than for reference-quality encodes.

Yes I think they are not in the optimized mode right now, they are still creating the standard

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