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Comment by tysonbru | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious how much AV2 will actually help older hardware in practice.

I’m on a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro: 2.6 GHz 6-core i7, 64 GB RAM. The machine is still more than powerful enough for normal desktop work and software dev, but YouTube in Chrome has become borderline unusable for me. My internet is fine, Safari plays the same videos smoothly, and YouTube “Stats for nerds” shows plenty of buffer but the decoding makes youtube unusable in chrome for me.

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I use Firefox but YouTube has recently started giving me a pop-up occasionally telling me that they are intentionally slowing down the site because they don't like some of the browser extensions I use.

Has nothing to do with video codec.

Download the video with yt-dlp & play it in mpv you'll see it even flies on a potato.

Play the same in browser and it'll be dropping frames left and right.

Sound like a Chrome/Youtube problem. My 2012 Macbook Pro plays 1080p AV1 just fine in VLC (pretty sure Youtube works fine too in Firefox, but I didn't check whether or not it was AV1 or H264).

For reference: dav1d 0.5 can decode 143 FPS of a 1080p 8-bit video on a third gen core i7.[1] I doubt there's been much in the way of regressions since then. 10-bit and 4k is obviously a lot more heavy, but not really relevant to older devices.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/dav1d-0.5 (it's mislabled as a core i3, but the 3770K is a core i7).

use the enhanced h264-ify to block the av1 stream, av1 takes a lot of cpu

Unfortunately for you, newer codecs use more CPU than older ones so AV2 would probably be even worse.

Newer codecs has generally introduced more ways a video can be encoded, so that the encoder need to work much harder to encode a video, so that it actually achieve the gains that the newer codec allows much more processing will be required. Decoding on the other hand, will mostly stay the same or increase only slightly. It's not likely do decrease though, so if you struggle playing av1 today, you will also struggle with av2.

For encoding, you can always write a simple encoder that use only the features that were present in mpeg2, and it will be about as efficient as mpeg2 as well. Newer codecs has more features that allows more efficient encoding, at the cost of more processing.

I gave up using Chrome a decade ago. It’s a power sucking pig. Safari has its own issues, but at least it’s usable. When I need something that isn’t Safari, I use Firefox.

Safari has a terrible developer experience and has been behind in implementing the various browser API for years, including AV1 support.

Safari has had AV1 support for a long time. Absolute majority of "various browser API" that they don't support are all kinds of "Web Bluetooth"-like crap that I don't need and which only introduces attack and tracking surface when supported.

Like I said, Safari has its own issues. But huge power consumption isn’t one of them.

Chrome has used less power than Safari for a few years now. As far as I know, the only good reason to use Safari is to use FairPlay DRM for sites that need it. For all other purposes, Firefox or Chrome is superior. https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...

Interesting, thanks. I’ll give it another try. It certainly used to be a pig. I remember times when the fan on my MacBook sounded like a freaking hovercraft and you’d go into system monitor and see a Chrome process just sucking down every CPU cycle. You’d quit Chrome and the fans would spin down and stop. But if they’ve fixed that, maybe it’s worth another go.

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