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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

So far the pirate scene has totally ignored AV1. Most stuff is still H.264, with some H.265 (HEVC) releases.

It's only recently been possible to actually use HEVC/x265 for transparent encodes, previous versions of x265 removed film grain/digital noise to such a degree that the quality was worse than x264 at equivalent bitrates. Combine that with the massively increased costs in both encoding/decoding time (and worse x265 encoding tools/knowledge), x265 simply wasn't worthwhile except for crappy re-encodes at super low bitrates for people with crappy internet.

AV1 is far from ready even for crappy bitrate starved releases, but that's where you'll see it used first.

Recently you've begun to see a lot of x265 releases though, usually with HDR, the only significant feature x264 can't provide.

For sub-4K SDR content there's really no incentive for pirates to switch to x265 or AV1, it's just a nuisance. With torrenting people don't pay for the extra bitrate x264 requires, unlike streaming services like Netflix, the ~20-40% bitrate savings of x265 and AV1 are not important at all, especially compared to the other "costs" of compatibility issues and 10X-100X longer encode times.

Exactly this, it's slightly annoying to see the claim scenes are "slow" or "not what they used to be". They use the technology that it makes the most sense to use, weighing up encoding speeds, tooling, quality at the resolutions they care about, and output size. They will actually move when some of these technologies actually start providing major benefits that outstrip the existing technologies in these categories.

I disagree with your reasoning, the scene hasn't slowed because new technologies don't offer anything it's slowed because optimizing every bit of the transfer like you had to on old internet is no longer relevant and so "use the technology that it makes the most sense to use" has become "use h.264 or h.265 because dedicated players and hardware offload support it". If anyone really cares about extreme quality at this point they'll just download a rip of the original media rather than a transcoded copy

There is no longer a driving force behind pushing the limit of encoding in the scene and so the scene HAS slowed.

Another point is that the pirate scene obviously does not care at all about patents/openness, so their choices are driven strongly by technological factors. Plain old conservatism also plays a role.

This can be seen in warez too, where RAR is still popular despite 7z being often just as good in compression ratio while also open.

They don't care about violating patents but they care about open source more than the general population. Taking a look at the stats from a large private tracker, a huge chunk of the users are running firefox on linux and the forums are full of open source talk.

FLAC tends to be the only allowed lossless codec over all the proprietary ones.

It is exactly this reason I wonder if we should just stick to x264. You can do very decent x264 encode in low bitrate if you don't care about about film grain and noise. x265 also has advantage in 4K release due to increase in block size.

But x265 has made lots of improvement, I was watching some late 2016 encode the other day, and the current 2019 encode looks a lot better on the same ( Low-ish, 3Mbps) bitrate.

One reason I am looking for next generation VVC and AV2. The current AV1 an HEVC just don't give enough improvement that matter to me. They are far from what marketing slides want you to believe in 50% reduction.

> It's only recently been possible to actually use HEVC/x265 for transparent encodes, previous versions of x265 removed film grain/digital noise to such a degree

And even then I've found that it still requires tweaking. With x264, pick a preset, crank the RF high enough, and it'll come out transparent. I haven't seen any of my own x265 encodes, even for high RF encodes (RF16+), come out transparent without adding '--no-sao --aq-mode 3' (without aq-mode 3 - dark areas are prone to blocking (especially SD sources), without no-sao - film grain is easily lost).

The pirate scene isn't what it used to be when it comes to adopting new technology. In the past the scene would adopt whatever codec gave the highest compression efficiency with little regard for anything else. You could see this in the adoption of MPEG4 ASP even though it was not widely adopted by the commercial market.

Today compatibility with set-top boxes is much more of a consideration than it used to be. The increased speed of internet service and reduced cost of storage have also lessened pressure to pursue ultimate efficiency.

> Today compatibility with set-top boxes is much more of a consideration than it used to be.

My experience with the anime and tokusatsu fansubbing community is the opposite. There's a lot of "you must use mpv or CCCP", and a ton of disdain for people who watch on something other than a PC.

A small handful of groups will provide alternate "toaster-friendly" downloads for people on set-top boxes. For example, for ongoing TV shows, the main release will be a 720p or 810p softsubbed MKV with Hi10P video, and the "toaster-friendly" release will be a 480p hardsubbed MP4 with 8-bit video. This is mostly in the tokusatsu scene, though; for set-top boxes, the anime community mostly relies on dedicated encoding groups like DeadFish who provide "toaster-friendly" versions of other groups' releases because most groups won't even consider releasing something that's set-top-box-friendly. Also, there is an assumption that if you don't want to watch on a PC, then you don't mind SD video.

For fansubs that use Blu-ray-sourced video, there are no "toaster-friendly" options. You can basically expect groups to do a 720p Hi10P release alongside a 1080p release which is either Hi10P or HEVC, both of which are softsubs-only and in MKV containers. The audio is often, but not always, FLAC.

For those unfamiliar with how subtitles work, softsubs are incompatible with pretty much every set-top box. And there are some groups that will use intricate typesetting that can bring even decent PCs to their knees. For example, Commie is notorious for releasing an episode of JoJo's Bizarre Adventures with typesetting so over the top that it crashed most people's computers (I've never seen the episode myself, but I understand it involved hundreds of lines of text all continuously zooming in and out).

But even the anime/toku community doesn't use AV1, and HEVC is only for 1080p releases sourced from Blu-ray video (and to reiterate, a lot of groups will still use Hi10P even for 1080p).

The anime piracy community is kind of its own beast. And we like it that way. :) Also, I would assume that there are different considerations for primarily dealing with animation as opposed to primarily live action.

> Also, I would assume that there are different considerations for primarily dealing with animation as opposed to primarily live action.

Eh, I've noticed similar from the tokusatsu community, and that's live action. The only difference is that some (but not all) toku groups will also provide toaster-friendly encodes in addition to their top-quality encodes, while anime groups rely on DeadFish for that.

The only toku group I can think of that touches HEVC is Pocket Universe, who specializes in muxing other groups' subs with Blu-ray-sourced video. Everyone else is mostly Hi10P.

>But even the anime/toku community doesn't use AV1

It is much too early for AV1 do see any real adoption. The existing encoders are very slow and/or lack features/tuning, and hardware support is non-existant.

In a year or two we will see encoder(s) at a sufficiently high optimization and quality level that it will be a candidate for high quality encodes, and if AV1 gains traction (outside of streaming) at that point I'm certain it will start in the anime scene.

edit: went and searched on Nyaa, and there are actually some AV1 encodes of various content, so some people are already experimenting.

> In the past the scene would adopt whatever codec gave the highest compression efficiency with little regard for anything else

> Today compatibility with set-top boxes is much more of a consideration than it used to be

My experience was the opposite, they seemingly stuck to Xvid in AVI containers for the longest time to support those divx-compatible DVD players even when newer codecs were more performant. Whereas these days while not the most common codec, most things do end up getting a release in h265.

The AV1 codec was finalized last summer, I'd wager we will need a couple of years before the encoders are able to show the capacity of AV1, including getting the best out of encoding performance optimizations.

As for the pirate scene, my impression is that outside of 'anime' they are very conservative and follow rigid specifications. And even in the 'anime scene', I'd estimate that ~90% of new releases are still h264 encodes.

For some reason there was never a transition from h264 over to HEVC in the pirate scene, and I don't think this will happen for AV1 either.

In my opinion, while AV1 improves on previous codecs, it's not a big enough technical improvement when taking into consideration the increased encoding time (perhaps further optimizations will help mitigate this).

Instead, I think the big draw is the lack of royalties. But royalties is not a factor for the pirate scene, so for them I believe it boils down to quality/encoding time and hardware support, and here h264 still reigns supreme.

The pirate scene is usually slow to adopt new codecs. They are generally shooting for compatibility.

There is a reason XVid stayed around forever.

The pirate scene is about playing stuff on current consumer hardware. Not to mention, they also need the hardware to encode stuff. Neither of which is attractive for av1 at the moment. Some pockets of the pirate scene used to be about open standards, but I think a lot of that died out. One tracker that I know moved from flac audio in remuxes for a long time to dts-hd ma. I don't remember the exact reasons. Maybe multi-channel flac isn't good, or people have better luck with receivers and dts-hd ma.

It's possibly because Atmos requires DTS-HD MA (there's no free alternative), or because people playing on standalone hardware are more likely to support DTS-HD MA than FLAC. In general though, FLAC will compress to smaller than the equivalent DTS-HD MA.

I think the pirate scene will be the first, which will take AV1. They always are very advanced in terms of technologies.

AV1 is just a very new codec. You can use it in the Web for Chrome and Firefox. But it is too early to use for downloadable video files. For video files you need a OS support. Microsoft has it only in Beta. Android will support it in Q. Linux supports AV1 already.

I think in next year we will see more and more AV1 everywhere, including pirate torrent trackers.

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