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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @01:09PM (2 children)
Unfortunately, the reference encoder is not yet very optimized, and is so slow that it is unusable in practice.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday September 15 2018, @01:43PM
Rule of thumb in the software development world - first make it work reliably, *then* make it work fast. Optimization is usually surprisingly easy - for something complex you can usually find at least a tenfold or two of performance improvements right out of the gate, but starting too soon can easily make finding and fixing bugs far more difficult.
Kind of a related philosophy to the old shooting/racing/etc. adage: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast".
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 15 2018, @03:54PM
They have to push this stuff out fast if they want to get hardware support and compete on a level playing field with H.265. Work out the kinks in the next 1-2 years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @05:40PM
I prefer free, open and no DRM.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday September 15 2018, @05:51PM (2 children)
Nah, that makes way too much sense. Do it in a browser instead.
People really are just too stupid for computers. If we ever manage to produce an AI it will probably euthanize the lot of us.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 15 2018, @05:53PM (1 child)
Netflix link is just a list of downloads.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday September 15 2018, @06:39PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16 2018, @05:30AM
Alex Jones is what we want on YouTube. Sadly, he is being censored.
You can rip out a man's tongue, but that doesn't make you right.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday September 16 2018, @07:58AM (1 child)
Did Google rent the whole Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure to encode these videos so soon?
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16 2018, @12:14PM
They don't need to - it was done on all of Chrome user's computers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16 2018, @11:47AM
So long as the content is still able to be viewed and downloaded