The Alliance for Open Media, which includes the likes of Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and Nvidia, among others, has announced the release of the AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification. The new open source and royalty-free codec is based on elements of other codecs that were recently in development: Daala, Thor, and VP10.
Tests of the codec have found that it can reduce the bitrate by 10-40% at the same quality when compared to VP9 and H.265/HEVC. The difference is more apparent at higher resolutions such as 4K/2160p.
By delivering 4K UHD video at an average of 30 percent greater compression over competing codecs according to independent member tests, AV1 enables more screens to display the vivid images, deeper colors, brighter highlights, darker shadows, and other enhanced UHD imaging features that consumers have come to expect – all while using less data.
“We expect that the installed base of 4K television sets to reach 300 million by the end of 2019 and therefore there is already latent demand for UHD services over today’s infrastructure. AV1 will be widely supported across the entire content chain, especially including services. We forecast rapid introduction of AV1 content delivery to help the widespread proliferation of UHD streaming,” said Paul Gray, a Research Director at IHS Markit, a global business information provider.
Also at Engadget, Tom's Hardware, and Advanced Television.
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YouTube, Netflix Publish First Videos Transcoded Using AV1
YouTube has uploaded about a dozen videos that were transcoded using the AV1 codec, which was introduced earlier this year. The test sequences are expected to give Google as well as developers of browsers, decoders, and encoders an understanding how to better use the new royalty-free codec. Netflix is also testing AV1 codec and offers everyone a video in different resolutions and featuring various color depth.
To date, YouTube has added 14 videos transcoded using the AV1 codec to a special playlist. The list includes various types of content, including a talking-head program, musical clips, action videos, and demo footages from RED and Blackmagic Design. YouTube says that this type of content represents a large share of videos hosted by the service, so it makes a lot of sense for the company to learn how they behave on various devices in terms of performance, power consumption, and overall stability.
At present, AV1 support is available only in those Chrome 70 and Firefox Nightly builds released after September 12th. Meanwhile, the test videos use AV1 for resolutions that are lower than 480p, underscoring the fact that they are meant to test decoders that, for the moment, are going to be anything but optimized. This is on top of the fact that at the moment there are no hardware decoders that support AV1, so everything is being handled in software by the CPU to begin with. Eventually the codec will be used for content in 4K+ ultra-high-def resolutions, along with HDR and wide color gamuts.
Also at 9to5Google:
Users on Chrome 70 and Firefox Nightly builds after September 13th can test it by making sure media.av1.enabled and media.mediasource.experimental.enabled prefs are set.
chrome://flags/#enable-av1-decoder
Once running a supported browser, users can head to YouTube's TestTube experiments list and select "'Prefer AV1 for SD."
Related: VLC 3.0.0 Released, With Better Hardware Decoding and Support for HDR, 360-Degree Video, Chromecast
Alliance for Open Media Announces Release of AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) Specification
Intel Releases Open Source Encoder for Next-Gen AV1 Codec
Intel published its own open source CPU-based encoder for the next-generation and royalty-free AV1 codec (a codec is a program for encoding / decoding a digital data stream or signal). Intel is one of the main founding members of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), the non-profit group behind the development of the AV1 codec.
Intel's new encoder, called Scalable Video Technology AOMedia Video 1 (SVT-AV1), aims to fill the role of a good CPU-based encoding software tool until dedicated AV1 encoders are ready for prime time. The encoder supports the Linux, macOS and Windows operating systems.
A CPU-based encoder requires a beefy system, so it's no surprise the real-time encoding specifications for SVT-AV1 are no joke. SVT-AV1 requires Skylake-generation or newer Xeon processors with at least 112 threads and at least 48GB of RAM for 10-bit 4K video encoding. Outside of video streaming companies, these type of systems are out of reach for most. Consumers that want to encode AV1 videos may want to wait for dedicated AV1 encoding hardware to appear, which make take another year or so.
Here's a recent 42-minute talk (no transcript) about AOMedia Video 1 (AV1). Hardware support for AV1 should begin appearing around 2020.
Related: Alliance for Open Media Announces Release of AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) Specification
YouTube and Netflix Upload AV1-Encoded Videos for Testing
Google reportedly requires new Android TV devices support AV1 video decoding
While it's clear that AV1 is gaining popularity for online streaming and media consumption, only a handful of streaming services to date encode some of their content in AV1. YouTube streams some videos encoded in AV1 on select Android TV devices, Vimeo started to encode some of the videos on its Staff Picks channel in AV1, and Netflix streams select titles in AV1 if the service's data saving mode is turned on. Google, one of the biggest proponents of AV1, recently announced its plans to use AV1 for "the whole range of Google's video applications and services".
For more widespread AV1 adoption to happen, however, there needs to be more devices with hardware to decode AV1, which is a necessity to ensure power-efficient and speedy video playback. To that end, Google is requiring that all new Android TV devices launching after March 31, 2021, support AV1 video decoding. This requirement is said to apply to all new TV products launching with Android 10 or Android 11 later this year, according to an internal slide reviewed by XDA. This slide is part of a presentation that Google held for its Android TV partners last year. Therefore, we do not know if this deadline is up-to-date, and we did not receive a response from Google when reached for comment. Shortly after the publication of this article, it was brought to our attention that Protocol's Janko Roettgers first broke this news in a newsletter dated October 29, 2020.
There's more evidence behind Google making AV1 support a requirement for all future Android TV devices. The company reportedly already requires AV1 video decoding support for all 4K HDR and 8K Android TV devices that launch with Android 10. Industry insider AndroidTV Guide points out that many recently launched 4K HDR Android TV devices ship with an AV1-compatible SoC, such as the MediaTek T30/T31/T32 or the Realtek RTD2851M. TCL's X915 8K TV, for instance, supports AV1 decoding thanks to its Realtek RTD2851M SoC combined with the RTD2893, making it one of the first TVs to support streaming 8K videos from YouTube. Since Google is already pushing high-end TVs to support AV1, it makes sense that they're soon extending this requirement to all Android TV products, which Google is able to do since it controls the Android TV platform.
"Android TV devices" includes actual TVs along with ARM set-top boxes that plug into TVs and run Android TV.
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1).
Also at Notebookcheck.
Related:
Intel Releases Open Source Encoder for AV1 Codec
YouTube and Netflix Upload AV1-Encoded Videos for Testing
Alliance for Open Media Announces Release of AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) Specification
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Friday March 30 2018, @04:03AM (6 children)
I look forward to replacing my television and re-purchasing all of my movies and television series yet again. Let's see, this would be the... sixth time I would buy the original Star Wars trilogy.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Friday March 30 2018, @04:16AM (1 child)
You would likely purchase a decoder box for your current tv rather than replace the whole thing. Would be worth the $50 investment since the 40% improvement and 400% improvement over MPEG-2 could increase the number of subchannels so that a market with 30 total broadcast subchannels over all its broadcast stations would go to 60-100.A much better deal than for pay TV.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @04:45AM
Doesn't allow for converter boxes. It requires the support to be built into the television along with 'optional' internet access for providing targeted advertising experiences.
The entire point of ATSC 3.0, in the US at least, will be to plug the 'analog and broadcast flag free digital' hole once and for all, while also providing for the possibility of per view licensing and targeted advertising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @04:25AM (1 child)
1. VHS
2. "New Hope" reprint
3. Betamax
4. Lazerdisk
5. Special Edition VHS
6. DVD
7. BluRay
and I feel like there is something I missed.
(Score: 1) by GDX on Friday March 30 2018, @05:53AM
you have missed D-VHS
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @04:39AM (1 child)
But ONLY if Han shoots first.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday March 30 2018, @06:49AM
Granted, but his blaster has been replaced with a walkie-talkie
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @04:22AM (1 child)
They haven't actually released the 1.0 specification. Numerous stories and comments from people at the green site, Reddit and hacker news have made this clear. They haven't even finalized the bitstream, let alone finished the specification. Instead, marketing went off early because things have settled enough so that they could release "draft" specifications. They are actually formalizing the specification and reducing churn on the various reference software. But marketing sees that their CD system can spit out PDFs of the specification according to the last commit, so they fired off the press release announcing 1.0 without actually understanding what is going on.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday March 30 2018, @07:20AM
Not only that, but MPEG-LA will file patent claims against it the instant it is released. They have done this with just about every other codec, [wikipedia.org] and all they need to s a little bit of mathematics to look similar. The claim to act as a patent sharing clearing house, but are in fact one of the worst patent trolls.
The key is right there in TFS: "s based on elements of other codecs". Bang. They've admitted linage and that means they've already got a patent fight on their hands even if those "other codecs" appear to be still in the clear.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.