Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> YouTube for example, encodes content in H.264/AVC, VP9 and AV1

Why don't I see AV1 in many Youtube videos though? Checking with yt-dlp. It looks like they were planning to use it, but didn't really roll it out.

View on HN

My (not super informed) understanding is that it may also depend on how popular the video is - the increase in encoding time is less worth it if there are few people seeing quality or bandwidth benefits (depending on how they tune it).

>if there are few people seeing quality or bandwidth benefits (depending on how they tune it).

The client readiness is there. Already at 75% (relative to H264 100%, HEVC 15%).

It is thus clear which of the new codecs won client-side; it will only grow from here.

Definitely worth it.

I suppose that's also part of it, I was meaning more that the cost is more worth it for a video being served a million times vs. a few hundred times.

Av1 is almost always present in >2k videos

the new codecs tend to only get deployed for higher resolution. 5% better 360p video doesn't help if you are also sending 4k video.

Ah, that makes sense. Just checked one with high resolution available and I can see AV1 there.

Yeah, that's true. I did see something from Meta recently where they were delivering lower resolution/bandwidth AV1 to devices that didn't have AV1 hardware decoders, but had enough CPU for software decoding of the smaller renditions.

They totally use, but on more popular videos. A fun fact is that they run (or used to) the same VP9 bitrate for AV1, and thus, the video quality on AV1 was way better (as AV1 is more efficient than VP9).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com