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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

A 20% data saving but how much extra battery usage for devices which don’t have hardware decoding for AV1 (which last time I checked was all of them)?

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Not all of them, hardware AV1 has been rolling out over the last year. LG include hardware AV1 decoding in two of their TV lines now (OLED ZX and NanoCell). MediaTek's new SOCs include it, and they're being used in Xiaomi, Nokia, and Motorola phones this year. Amlogic's TV and set-top box SOCs, used in things like the Amazon Fire TV as well as Android smart TVs and dedicated media players, include it. Realtek's TV SOC with hardware AV1 support ships "early 2020."

Hardware AV1 decoding is available on some Android devices right now, and will ship with a lot more over the course of the year. So it seems the perfect time to ship an AV1 option behind an opt-in setting, which is what they've done. If you don't have hardware support and it's not worth the battery drain then you don't have to select it and there's no way they're removing H.264 support anytime soon.

Hopefully the open/free nature means it'll be cheaper to integrate into lower end ARM IPs so that is not just the flagship Snapdragon and Exynos chips that offer AV1

Getting it into the hands of the top 5 Samsung devices would probably cover a significant market share (not to mention getting it into all Apple phones/tablets).

>it'll be cheaper to integrate into

It is not like the hardware part of the die is free. AV1 has comparatively higher decoding requirement even in hardware.

Indeed. I imagine some older codecs could be dropped though, and the cost saved on IP should offset it. I'm not sure what the comparative silicon size might be though so I can't speculate.

Which is why they launched it behind an opt-in checkbox.

New codecs are always chicken-and-egg -- you need to have content available before the hardware encoders/decoder silicon gets produced and then trickles down to the phones.

Do phones have HW support for VP9?

edit: looks like it, at least for recent snapdragon phones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations

Do 2+ plus year old phones count as recent?

From the link,

Snapdragon 820: launched early 2016

Snapdragon 660: announced on May 9, 2017

Not saying that all phones made after 2017 will have it, but there are mid range phones on sale that do.

I see a question mark next to the 660 on the Wikipedia page. Is there some indication of that date from elsewhere?

Exactly. I am thinking if this is going to be some sort of play against VVC.

Or will Youtube and Netflix force AV1 upon everyone where if you want high quality HDR or 4K Content you will require AV1.

> Or will Youtube and Netflix force AV1 upon everyone where if you want high quality HDR or 4K Content you will require AV1.

I sure hope so!

I sure hope it's a war on VVC. I don't know why anyone would want a patent encumbered pay-to-use video codec over an open free one unless you're a stakeholder.

>I don't know why anyone would want a patent encumbered pay-to-use video codec

Again AV1 is not Patent free either.

But it is royalty-free. The patents are freely licensed to those implementing/using AV1.

All else being equal, that is...

On YouTube you already need a device that supports VP9.2 to get HDR. And there's a huge amount of HDR TVs/STBs (including Sony and the flagship Shield TV) which don't get HDR YouTube because they only support base VP9 and H.265.

Youtube probably will; I doubt Netflix will. Netflix has no horse in this race, so to speak.

It's also just easier for Netflix to keep the data in more formats, because they have far, far less data than Youtube.

The real question is how the rest of the market will respond to EVC, not necessarily VVC.

As far as I can tell, I dont see EVC being in the race. Its free profile is barely any better than H.264, while its pay profile is no where near VVC.

Edit: to clarify, this is not a rhetorical question - I would like to know so that I and other end users can make an informed choice about whether to opt in to this or not.

If you are on battery devices, you either do it in Hardware or not watch it. Even Software H.264 decoding on most Android phone is quite taxing, as they are relatively weak in single core performance. The Energy saving from 20% bitrate in 4G transfer is going to be minimal comparatively speaking.

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