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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
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:24AM (1 child)
There is a row for AV1 on the compatibility chart, but no support yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:41AM
Your guess is as good as mine. I'm expecting AMD APUs to include it as late as 2021 since they have lagged behind the desktop CPUs and GPUs.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:28AM (15 children)
We've been playing audio visual stuff for decades now. Meaning, of course, that we've played AV on some rather lame hardware. As a rule, if you have decent speakers, and a decent monitor, playback quality is satisfactory, good, or excellent, even with ancient computers. Now, a "CPU-based encoder requires a beefy system"???? This suggests to me that AV1 is just so much bloatware.
Wonder if I can find my old Sony Walkman? No video, but the sound was good in 1972 or thereabouts.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:38AM (4 children)
These early software encoders are for those who really need it, like big companies handling lots of video or needing to test out the codec. They can afford two 28-core Intel CPUs or a 64-core AMD Epyc.
Video compression becomes more computationally complex as we attempt to get lower bitrates for a given quality. However, you will see dedicated decoding and encoding support added to new GPUs, APUs, etc. probably starting in 2020.
Encoding is much more difficult than decoding, which is what you do for playback. Don't mix them up. There is now a fast software decoder in development, dav1d [jbkempf.com].
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
I think TFA said 112 cores please. And 48 GB RAM.
If a minstrel has musical instruments attached to his bicycle, can it be called a minstrel cycle?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 06 2019, @04:21PM
112 logical cores, aka threads. 2 CPUs * 28 cores * 2 threads per core = 112 threads.
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(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:39AM (1 child)
It still says something about the encoding complexity. I can encode h.265 in better than real time with an 8 core Opteron system.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:06AM
Further optimizations could be made to the encoder. Intel likely slapped its encoder together using code it used for its HEVC encoder (this is info I got from the linked video talk in TFS). But in a world where you can have 16-32 cores for relatively cheap, we've finally found something to do with those cores. 16-core Ryzen is probably coming this year. I think we could see another doubling of cores on the TSMC "5nm" [anandtech.com] node.
https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/ao-media-looks-ahead-to-av2-as-av1-picks-up-momentum/ [rethinkresearch.biz]
I'm excited to see what AV2 will bring to the table. Some potential features were dropped during AV1 development [wikipedia.org] because they would have made performance even worse than it is now:
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:56AM (7 children)
The key word you missed is in bold above. Encoder.
The remainder of your comment refers to a decoder
Those are not the same things.
Video encoders have always needed beefier systems than the corresponding decoder.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Pino P on Wednesday February 06 2019, @06:43AM (6 children)
You'll still need a system beefy enough to run a real-time encoder if you want to record TV, participate in video chat or screen sharing, etc.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday February 06 2019, @08:46AM
But, it depends on the quality of what you are encoding, as well as the compression rate (as previously mentioned.)
10 years ago (roughly) it took a beefy machine to run Handbrake and encode a DVD down to a roughly 750MB file in realtime. My current (2-yr old) laptop can do the same in less than 1/2 hour. You could always encode the DVD down with a less beefy machine even 10 years ago, it just wasn't realtime. I have not tested, but I am guessing that my current laptop can at least encode a 720p broadcast in realtime... not sure about greater quality though. (Remember, twice the vertical and horizontal resolution requires 4x the amount of data that needs to be manipulated.) Also remember, that it depends on if your GPU has encoding hardware as well. It can be done without a hardware encoder, but again, it just takes longer.
As for video chat, heck, smartphones have been doing that for 10 years, and webcams have been out longer. Of course, the big difference is the quality and resolution. I play D&D through Roll20.net... They have built in audio/video streaming through the browser with the WebRTC platform. So video chat in realtime is not an issue at all for modern computers... even in a browser; but you will not be doing it in 4k video. Screen sharing takes up even less because you do not need a very high frame rate for that.
As I did mention 4k video... I doubt many people will be encoding that and streaming it in realtime. At today's compression rates, are their even that many people in the US that have the bandwidth to handle it (even just the download bandwidth, let alone upload which many ISPs still manipulate to be 1/10th the speed of downloading.) (And this is probably a huge factor in why intel is promoting a new codec, for better compression of higher resolution video.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:19AM (4 children)
You'll still need a system beefy enough to run a real-time encoder if you want to record TV, [participate in video chat or screen sharing], etc.
No you don't. For recording for later viewing, all you need a system capable of storing the bitstream for later processing. Or even a system capable of partially encoding the bitstream, and finishing the encoding later.
A good compromise is to run a fast lossless compression algorithm on the raw bitstream. That allows you to do reasonable compression, and can be played back immediately. You run an intensive lossy compressor on the losslessly compressed bitstream as a background task. All you need it 'a bit' of storage as a buffer. For bonus points, make the intensive encoder able to operate on the output of the fast encoder without needing to decompress it to recompress it.
As for video chat and screen sharing, use existing hardware encoders for other codec algorithms and wait until the hardware encoders for AV1 become available.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday February 06 2019, @02:11PM (3 children)
What lossless algorithm works on MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC video or Dolby Digital or AAC audio in broadcasts? I thought one was supposed to turn off, say, web Gzip encoding for these file types because compressing already compressed data doesn't save anything.
So the amount that you can record per day, or "a bit" as you put it, depends on how much you can transcode in a day's CPU time. It might not affect people who DVR only about one or two shows, but multi-viewer households might have a lot more shows scheduled to capture and transcode to SD for playback on offline mobile devices.
That wouldn't allow communication between a user of free software and a user of an Apple device, as I haven't heard of Apple's plans to implement any free codecs other than eventually AV1. Apple has gone all-in on MPEG since 2001, when QuickTime 5.0 introduced Sorenson Video 3 based on an early draft of AVC.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday February 06 2019, @05:23PM (2 children)
I think you are missing the point. If you have a 'raw' bitstream, it is not MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC encoded. If you have a bitstream that is already compressed, you are not looking for an encoder, but a transcoder.
If Apple don't want to support open standards, shrug. AFAIK they support WebRTC by supporting the Opus audio codec and H.264 for video [bloggeek.me], and it looks like VP8 has been added to Webkit/Safari. [webkit.org]
Have a nice day.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday February 06 2019, @06:33PM
Precisely. Someone doing a lot of HD to SD transcoding would need to use older encoders (x264 or libvpx) until AV1 encoding hardware or more time-efficient AV1 encoding software becomes widespread.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:04PM
Apple is a founding member [aomedia.org] of the Alliance for Open Media. So it's a sure bet that they will support AV1 when they are ready to do so.
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:09AM
Dude, you know not whereof you speak. Yes, MPEG2 videos work just fine on ancient hardware. And they take up a fuckton more space to store or bandwidth to stream for the same quality. They're not a little bit smaller, they're less than a tenth the size at the same quality. This actually matters since our ISPs still think DSL is broadband.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 06 2019, @03:04PM
Some codes are asymetric. It takes massive power to encode the video into a high quality compact format, which can then be easily and cheaply decoded.
If a minstrel has musical instruments attached to his bicycle, can it be called a minstrel cycle?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @05:29AM (3 children)
Okay, so its a lot of samn work to do in realtime, but not everything needs to be encoded in real time.
If I throw it on an old PPC to reencode a DVD to a tenth its size, do I care if it takes a few weeks?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday February 06 2019, @06:07AM
The broadcasters/carriers who need it done in real time are shelling thousands of dollars for a few channels of h.264 or JPEG2000. Today.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday February 06 2019, @02:14PM
Say you borrow one DVD per week, and you have only one machine on which to transcode with no opportunity for parallel speedup by using multiple cores. Then "a few weeks" to transcode each one causes the backlog to pile up.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday February 06 2019, @04:52PM
Live streaming is such a major source of content today software encoders are very relevant. Even with H.264, people streaming Twitch will use software encoders instead of hardware encoders because of the higher compression rates. With streaming bandwidth is a major obstacle, so AV1's better compression could provide an incentive to migrate to the AV1 codec.
This use case will be one of the hardest to fulfil: someone streaming to Twich or Youtube probably cannot justify the specs called out in the summary. This use-case also is typically bandwidth limited, and therefore can receive the most benefit from the AV1 codec. The one thing I see missing from the summary/article is the hardware requirements for lower resolutions.
If anyone is interested in streaming software, I would recommend OBS https://obsproject.com/wiki/System-Requirements [obsproject.com] . Their main use-case is gamers but it is cross platform and low latency so it can be used for most applications. I make local recordings and leverage Intel Quick Sync on my IvyBridge processor with minimal performance impact.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:24AM (1 child)
-- https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/blob/master/LICENSE.md [github.com]
Who knows what the hell that means? Probably nobody and thus lawyers will love it as it means they get to fleece people so hard.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 06 2019, @12:39PM
It just means more patents can be added to the Alliance for Open Media pool, and you don't infringe on them by using the codec.
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