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Comment by fishgoesblub | Hacker News Reader

Of the 3 software AV1 encoders, the only one that is fully dead is the Rust encoder (rav1e). If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders, they would fund and develop them.

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https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d got funded and developed. it is unfortunately a bit slower (typically by a single-digit percentage) than dav1d.

I can totally understand why people would want a memory-safe decoder, but a memory-safe encoder is niche. Finding a memory-safety bug in a decoder is a matter of finding a single unchecked integer field somewhere; finding a memory-safety bug in an encoder requires first finding some sort of logic bug in the encoder and then crafting an adversarial input that survives a number of highly lossy transformations.

Compare the number of CVEs against x264 (included decoders don't count!) and FFmpeg's H.264 decoder.

Fully dead in what sense? Seems like it still has active development to me.

It hasn't had any proper quality/speed improvements in years. Only thing that has changed is updating deps and some bug fixes.

Encoding is a way, way less risky thing to be doing compared to decoding.

There are many paths to memory safety, even if the one Rust project seems to be going nowhere.

There's other memory-safe languages, and there's formal verification.

e.g. seL4 favors pancake.

> If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders

Really? How many codecs have your neighbors contributed money for the development of, just curious.

Given Netflix's involvement with SV1-AV1, (not even that) indirectly, at least 1.

I think these conversations are directed by the parties funding the efforts. Example: "we (large company) want a fast AV2 decoder" -> they pay a specialized team to do it -> this team works in C for the most part, so it is done in C. If there were financial incentives to do it in Rust, they'd pay more for a Rust decoder.

I'm more interested in the idea of general "people" (the commons) funding complex video encoders. I do wish that was the world we lived in, however :)

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