Cisco Leap Frogs H.264 Video Collaboration with Real-Time AV1 Codec
blogs.cisco.com
blogs.cisco.com
Specifically, their ability to capture and transmit usable speech is really poor. Between echo and poor noise gating, I'm not exaggerating when I say that I can make out fewer than 1/3 of the words in my team's conference calls.
I don't care how efficient the video codec is, if I can't clearly understand what the other people are saying, it's all useless.
To test your network, go to https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest and see if you have significant jitter or bufferbloat. If your rating is an A, then your good to go, otherwise its time to clean up your local network :P
Those cheap Cisco conference phones do sound terrible, and I don't think people replace them very often.
Google, Mozilla and all the organizations that have collaborated on WebRTC have spent 7+ years tuning this component. Much like Opus versus AMR-WB, I doubt there is anything notably better in the proprietary software/hardware world.
The orgs that develop the WebRTC standard have spent years implementing and experimenting with nearly every algorithm that is available for each of the various components (resulting in Opus, AV1, WebRTC AEC, etc), combing research papers daily and often working with researchers directly.
Stuff like WebRTC/OPUS is limited by the fact it runs in the browser or consumer hardware. It's not bad, it's just a different problem domain than commercial audio, and has different constraints. High quality conferencing equipment runs on a dedicated unit that your A/V integrator installs either in the room, or in a server closet and connects over Dante to the analog front end in the room, and usually is a package deal with good microphones (which could be wireless, or the hot thing now is to use beamforming).
We only ever get reports about problems when people are actually dialing into something over POTS.
I don't doubt it will be of higher quality than AVC. After all AVC was the work started pre 2000 and published in 2003.
1) Royalty (and annoying patent) free.
2) A reason for hardware decoders to exist.It is also not just beating AVC. They claim that it is higher quality than their own HEVC work, which they invested in heavily before it become clear that the licensing situation was not going to just "work itself out". They once told us that even they were surprised how many of the HEVC tools you could wind up using for real time, if you used them judiciously (basically: all of them).
I have worked with some of the team responsible for this project before, and we collaborated with them on some AV1 tools (most notably the CDEF loop filter, but also entropy coding and a few other things). They know their stuff, and really do seem to be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else on the RTC side of things.
Real-time can give you low latency but so can a system with a high enough throughput.
http://www.allegrodvt.com/products/silicon-ips/al-e210/
How does your solution compare to Allegros one?
Looking at the video (https://vimeo.com/344366650) of the Cisco talk, at 20m18s they say a "real time low latency HD software encoder" [emphasis added], which confirms it.
https://www.realtek.com/en/press-room/news-releases/item/rea...
Then again, there's a market for water-cooling blocks for phones so I guess anything is possible.
In all seriousness, though, integration into a set top box chip is a sign of commodity: A low power chip with limited application, where it is implemented not to power a large marketing department, but simply out of potential necessity.
This is to me a far bigger indicator of "things coming soon" than, say, integration into a high-end GPU.
Since that time HEVC encoding has only become faster and less expensive.
This real-time AV1 encoder achieves 1080p30, which is simply speaking 8 times less pixels than that 2014 demo. And compares against H.264 which says it all.
They compared against HEVC as well. To quote the article: "This means that we can substantially raise quality, while saving bits, all with a very usable CPU footprint. We have found that the real-world compression/speed trade-offs for AV1 are in fact excellent, and better than HEVC."
And the business problem with HEVC is: "HEVC (aka H.265) comes with unacceptable patent cost, risk and uncertainty."
HEVC had its shot but the terrible licensing stunted its growth and AV1 will replace it. Leonardo Chiariglione says the MPEG business model is broken and I think he's right:
http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...
which is a very real concern. (a bit tired arguing with people defending Google's contraption vs a codec with innovation from dozens of companies)
It isn't. Innovation in video coding is driven by the need to achieve the same image quality in fewer bits for easier and cheaper distribution. All video platforms, providers, and users have a stake in achieving that improvement.
Video coding is not finished yet. There's still more to do and there will be an AV2 eventually.
Not the bit when he says AV1 looks much better than x265 (which he started and led development on) I guess.
I suggest you see the whole video.
I enjoyed the bit when he flashed up the logos of Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Microsoft and other AOM members as showing strong support for HEVC from streaming platforms. And the bit when he said that support by AOM member Apple was really key to HEVC success in America. Or that AOM member Samsung was putting HEVC in TVs.
The guy seems smart and informed, but the video had a lot of dramatic irony since many of the corporate big guns he uses to quantify HEVC success seem to be more and more vocal about their dissatisfaction with HEVC and plans to ditch it for AV1 as soon as possible, which is a phyrric kind of victory.
Do you have any source on this?
One of the other talks at the event where this was announced was by NGCodec who where showing off their Xilinx based AV1 encoder, though I believe it's intra only at the moment.