Doesn't Netflix use AV1 exclusively to stream it's contents? Even if it's not using it, I think that this news will be a boon to AV1 usage adoption as i hope that HEVC will be replaced with AV1 in Netflix.
And double its electrical power impact by going from hardware decoding to software decoding? I certainly hope not. (Anyway on TVs, it's impossible to do in software decoding, both because the CPUs are very bad, and even with literally 0 CPU you can't access 4K HDR surfaces)
> that HEVC will be replaced with AV1 in Netflix.
I personally would wait for AV1 to be court-tested before eagerly switching to it. Unlike dear ol' Theora, AV1 wasn't designed to not be patent encumbered. One would even argue the opposite. It is "patent free" only because Google claimed it was, and we're hoping noone will have the will to go against Google. Broadcom might have them.
You're confusing two separate issues: patents and the licensing of those patents.
AV1 is not "patent free" at all. There are plenty of patents that pertain to AV1 owned by the Alliance for Open Media. AOMedia gives you a patent license to use AV1 royalty-free:
https://aomedia.org/license/patent-license/
https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-m...
What's happening separately is that patent licensing organizations are forming their own patent pools in an attempt to seek rent from existing and future AV1 users. Their claim is that they have patents essential to AV1 and you must pay them a licensing fee.
Sisvel is trying it on: https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programmes/audio-and-video-...
And so is Avanci: https://www.avanci.com/video/
They characterize this is as providing AV1 implementers the "opportunity" to minimize the risk of being sued:
https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
These grubby patent pool organizations are the practical reason why it's better to stick with royalty-free formats and protocols on the internet.
And why more work must to go into making sure internet audio and video formats are and remain royalty-free.
Sisvel's and Avanci's claims are essentially "Haha, you missed some! Sux to be you! Pay us!"
And the legal remedies for that are to test those claims in court and win, or to buy Sisvel and Avanci off with a settlement.
Do you think we should just make do with H.264 for another 20 years, or do you think there ought to be a legal solution to the patent mess we're in?
They won't agree to that. They are already not agreeing to that.
The two options to keep AV1 royalty-free are their claims are found to be invalid in court or they get bought off via a settlement.
It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
Youtube made it mandatory to have AV1 decoding in TVs/STBs for new devices since 2? 3? years, so it should become more common. (but embedded SoCs not meant for TV are still way behind.)
> Mali being the biggest.
FWIW, on the vast majority of devices (well, all that I'm aware of), Mali isn't responsible for hardware video decoding.
I think you mean Google, and they made it mandatory for Android. Most of those old devices don't use the latest Android version. And YouTube still happily delivers up VP9 to older versions as recently as two months ago.
> FWIW, on the vast majority of devices (well, all that I'm aware of), Mali isn't responsible for hardware video decoding.
If you're talking about LG, Samsung and Sony; yeah they have their own image processing hardware. That only applies if you're using the TV's app and not a settop device.
To clarify, I'm not claiming there are no AV1 devices or that it's particularly rare. Just stating that it's not ubiquitous enough to be made universal without a large segment of the populace/devices being affected.
I mean Youtube. Mentioning Youtube requirement is more relevant than Android's requirement since many more TVs and STBs ship with Youtube than just Android, and is older than Android's.
> If you're talking about LG, Samsung and Sony; yeah they have their own image processing hardware.
I'm not. Amlogic, Rockchip, Allwinner, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, Unisoc, Google Tensor, Realtek. None of those SoC vendor use Mali for hardware video decoding.
Wikipedia [0] list a lot of SoCs using Mali GPU, but doesn't list a single one using Mali video decoder. Looks like they abandoned it since they haven't announced any new version since 2019.
Roughly; Intel since Tiger Lake (2020); not that it makes much difference.
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
Depends; Mediateks and Rockchips do support it; finally also Qualcomm (with AV1 being mandatory in Android 14).
I agree, it will take some time (years), until people replace their devices and AV1 will be universally available.
But it is available in devices sold today, which was the point.
I never said it wasn't. I pointed out the main difficulty in going 100% AV1. Not that no one would be able to watch AV1 videos:
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
> "AV1 hardware decoding is still pretty rare"
It is not. It comes with new devices.
The issue is, that it will take some time for replacement to be widespread enough, so that Netflix could switch wholesale. But do they have to switch everything, at once? They could switch by targeting the capable devices: AV1, where possible, AVC elsewhere.
They probably have such targeting already, but not they will have to disable the HEVC profiles for Germany (or EU).
No, you have to do best within the limits that Apple imposes, whether technical, business, legal, whatever.
If other platforms do not have these limits, there's no point in ignoring the additional capabilities and artificially limiting your product. If Apple wants them on their platform too, they are free to lift these limits.
Users don't care about the distinction, they will blame you for issues in your app, no matter if caused by Apple, app developers, or even phone providers.
For example, I don't see any Apple users blaming anyone for not providing native browser engines by respective browsers on iOS. Or not being able to purchase Kindle books in-app. Or similar, Apple-induced limitations.
Client-side hardware support is what holds AV1 back currently.
Send the AV1 stream to AV1-capable, fallback to AVC. Previously, there could be AV1 > HEVC > AVC priorities set up, after this only AV1 > AVC.