
AV1  Release - themihai
https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-video-innovation-era-with-av1-release/
======
ksec
I am more looking forward to future release. The current version is mostly a
bitstream freeze. And it is anywhere from few hundred to few thousands times
slower at encoding. While the current version isn't optimized at all, I wonder
how long would it take them to reach, say within 5x the speed of x265.

In another news, we have xvc, which is taking most of the H.266 purposed ideas
into its implementation. And it is already showing 30% better compression then
AV1.

Note: AOMedia have also updated its website.[1] One thing i notice is Apple is
the only one not using its Logo in the member site. And this feels a little
strange.

[1][https://aomedia.org/membership/members/](https://aomedia.org/membership/members/)

~~~
Daemon404
> I am more looking forward to future release. The current version is mostly a
> bitstream freeze.

It's not even a bitstream freeze. This 'release' was put out by the marking
folks, and wasn't even discussed with people on the AOM list (I'm part of AOM
via VideoLAN). The bitstream remains under development.

Near as I can tell this is just a PR piece before NAB.

~~~
ksec
Oh Christ. I thought they were fast, only last week they said they have a few
bugs still left to be fixed. ( And only last month they said they were still
listening to hardware makers on suggestions and changes to improve decoding
speed )

Thanks for pointing this out.

One reason why I dont like / trust the folks at On2 / VP8, it is nice AOMedia
now has folks like you to keep them honest and humble.

Have a nice day.

~~~
Daemon404
There is concerted effort on the AOM list to finish and close all bugs or
features that require normative bitstream changes, so I would expect it isn't
_too_ much longer. The number of remaining issues is small-ish, but not zero.

The involvement of hardware people has been a boon, though tough for software
people at times :).

------
FullyFunctional
This is awesome. I started tracking AV1 and TLS 1.3 1.5 years ago and they
arrived within days of each other.

I hope AV1 will get the kind of love that got us the x264 encoder.

EDIT: my timeline was slightly off and reworded is make it clear I understand
the difference between spec and implementation.

~~~
m1el
It's a nitpick, but a necessary one.

x264 is a codec. An implementation of H.264 standard.

x264 is loved because it is very optimized and fine-tuned. There are plenty of
H.264 implementations that aren't.

We're probably not going to see AV1 implementations on the same level as x264
for at least a few years.

~~~
Shtirlic
It's correct that av1 based on vp9? So vp9 codecs exists and can be used as
start for av1 implementation?

~~~
BTeam
The base was VP10 + tools from Thor (Cisco) and Daala (Xiph.Org/Mozilla), and
it evolved from there to AV1 through a process of "experiments", test, IP
checks and then its enablement.

Assuming that VP10 shares a significant base design with VP9 it would not be
surprising if some part of VP9 sillicons decoders could be leveraged on
customer hardware, while awaiting for more dedicated circuits.

But on the software end, libaom (AOM reference implementation) is indeed a
fork of libvpx. But this library is not broadly considered a good
implementation, even for VP9. Pehaps the guys behind EVE for VP9 [1] will
produce an AV1 implementation based of their codebase.

[1] [https://www.twoorioles.com/eve-for-vp9/](https://www.twoorioles.com/eve-
for-vp9/)

~~~
floatboth
Hopefully fast implementations won't be proprietary like EVE is.

------
ahartmetz
What is missing in the announcement is a link to a quality / bitrate
comparison with perceptual quality. Netflix seems to have a good automated
perceptual metric. PSNR is still a popular metric because it's "objective",
but codecs optimized for PSNR produce ugly, blurry results, like all the VPx
codecs. That said, a codec with great PSNR can probably be tuned for great
perceptual results.

The Vorbis people, who were involved in AV1, have produced some impressive
perceptual improvements even with inferior technology (Ogg Theora, based on
VP3.2), so they know what to do and how:
[https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/theora/demo9.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/theora/demo9.html)

~~~
metajack
It's not going to be decipherable without some help to point you to what to
compare and how to read the charts, but
[https://arewecompressedyet.com/](https://arewecompressedyet.com/) contains
many such comparisons and is what they use to evaluate branches and features,
etc. The Daala team has mostly focused on four metrics, of which PSNR is just
one and probably the least valued. PSNR-HVS-M is the "hardest" one, but it
also includes SSIM and another SSIM variant.

I'm sure one of the team will chime in shortly pointing to some recent
results.

------
markdog12
I noticed a while back AV1 flag was added to Chrome Canary, but I can't find
any videos on the web to test it on.

Firefox Nighly can play
[https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/](https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/)

~~~
yolostreet
try [http://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/v2.6.5/samples/dash-
if-r...](http://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/v2.6.5/samples/dash-if-reference-
player/index.html?url=https://bitmovin-
demos.commondatastorage.googleapis.com/googleAV1_Dec2017/test_v1_internal_test20170915/stream.mpd)
on canary

~~~
markdog12
Works, thx. Is that video the only one available? Also, it's capped at 720p
800kbps, anything higher? Would love to see how it does at 4k.

------
jhoechtl
This will shake up the digital media industry. You can safely bet on this
format, it's going to stay for long and promisses extremely good compression
quality ratio.

~~~
CharlesW
> _This will shake up the digital media industry. You can safely bet on this
> format…_

(1) Maybe (2) Not today, and realistically not for a few years (if ever).
"Standard" (whether _de jure_ or _de facto_ ) compressed media formats (e.g.
MP3, AAC, H.264) depend on an ecosystem of supporting products and services,
and the existence of that ecosystem for any given format can't be assumed.

------
_up
But how good is the quality? I watched the Mozilla Demo and at the 30 second
mark the "Robot Hand" distorted the green trees in the Background. Even at
720p@800kbps. Haven't noticed this with other hevc encodes at similar
bitrates.

[https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/](https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/)

~~~
clouddrover
Bitmovin's comparison: [https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-
dataset/](https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/)

MSU's comparison from a couple of months ago:
[http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-
New...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-
News/AV1-Beats-VP9-and-HEVC-on-Quality-if-Youve-Got-Time-says-Moscow-
State-122945.aspx)

The x265 guys complained about the recent MSU test:
[http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented-
msus-2017-c...](http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented-
msus-2017-codec-comparison/)

------
Flott
I can only hope that AV1 is gonna get some traction. It's hard to believe
since MPEG-4 and HEVC are already everywhere.

I know that the AOMedia foundation was created in response to MPEG-4 HEVC
licensing... Having an alternative might help getting rid of the HEVC!

~~~
shmerl
_> It's hard to believe since MPEG-4 and HEVC are already everywhere._

HEVC is far from being everywhere. Huge services like Youtube, Amazon Video,
Netflix and others are going to use AV1, not H.265. H.265 is already dead, it
just didn't admit defeat yet.

~~~
unwiredben
I don't think HEVC will go away; there's already a lot of fixed-function
embedded hardware out there with HEVC decoders that will never get AV1
support. All the streaming players have to support those for the foreseeable
future.

~~~
shmerl
Hardware gets obsolete. Fees for HEVC do not, so new hardware won't be using
it. For the legacy support, video services will use H.264 like Youtube does
now. They just won't offer higher resolution in such cases, which is fine.

------
userbinator
Oddly enough, the actual link to download the specification, reproduced below
for your perusal, seems to link to outlook.com and includes a bunch of other
interesting data:

[https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%...](https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Faomediacodec.github.io%2Fav1-spec%2Fav1-spec.pdf&data=04%7C01%7Cgfrost%40microsoft.com%7Cc01143f4353e426231d508d590e3a9c1%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C1%7C636574229902920663%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwifQ%3D%3D%7C-1&sdata=lLQibtMygoLH30UNXZcUZGAA1i%2FqNE%2Ff6fgotaX3uhI%3D&reserved=0)

The URL embedded within, however, is directly accessible:

[https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf](https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf)

Edit: I started reading the spec and found that the bulk of it it appears to
be mostly fragments of de-semicolon'd C code and plenty of lookup tables; in
other words, a lot of "how" but not much in the way of "why" or "what".
There's a noticeable lack of diagrams as well --- IMHO very important for
describing something as visual as a video codec. For comparison, I certainly
found the H.264 spec to be much more understandable than this AV1 one.

~~~
dirtbag
That first link looks like it came from email that went through Office 365,
probably copy pasted. We see the same in our Office 365 environment, links are
re-written to redirect through outlook.com's safelinks service.

------
shmerl
Congratulations! Now we need more adoption of hardware decoders for it. And
then patented stuff will start being phased out everywhere.

 _> AOMedia Supporting Quotes_

It's interesting, how Apple are notably missing from there. It's as if they
want to keep their support quiet.

~~~
clouddrover
> _And then patented stuff will start being phased out everywhere._

JPEG is patented, VP9 is patented, and AV1 is patented. Luckily, baseline JPEG
is licensed under royalty-free terms and so are VP9 and AV1. The issue is
never the patents but rather the licensing of those patents.

~~~
shmerl
Patented as in patent rolls demanding fees for it. AV1 is not patented, as in
trolls can get lost.

------
remir
It's great to see all these companies working together on this.

------
mtgx
All the more disappointing to see both Google and Microsoft embrace HEIF for
images in their next operating system versions. They really couldn't wait
another couple of years to develop an open AV1-based image format? Come on.

Who cares about what Apple does or doesn't do? Apple certainly doesn't seem to
care what Google and Microsoft do, which is why it continues to ignore open
standards like Vulkan and now went ahead and adopted another one of MPEG-LA's
proprietary and patent-encumbered formats.

Because they couldn't wait, now we may be stuck with another proprietary
standard for the web for another 20 years. Not to mention there could still be
others besides MPEG-LA to claim patents on HEIF and accuse developers of
infringement, just like it happened with HEVC. This mess could have been
avoided with a little bit of patience.

~~~
clouddrover
> _All the more disappointing to see both Google and Microsoft embrace HEIF
> for images_

HEIF itself is a container format. It currently supports JPEG, H.264, and
H.265 bitstreams:

[https://github.com/nokiatech/heif](https://github.com/nokiatech/heif)

Nothing precludes AV1 from being contained in a HEIF file.

~~~
robert_foss
Nothing practical is precluding AV1 from being included, however:

> HEIF is a visual media container format standardized by the Moving Picture
> Experts Group (MPEG)

So corporate politics will surely prevent it from happening. That being said I
did file a bug report:

[https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/issues/46](https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/issues/46)

~~~
clouddrover
Netflix is ahead of you:

[https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/](https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/)

~~~
TUSF
Honestly, couldn't they just adapt WEBP for it? It's basically just an RIFF
container with a VP8 key frame. Then again, it's WebP, and there's no need to
bloat that thing anymore.

Edit: Nevermind, I see. Going by the document, it's meant to be an exact
mirror to HEIF, but for AV1. Some interesting features too.

------
twotwotwo
One thing I'd love to see follow from this is an image format based on its
intra coding. The companies involved expressed interest
([https://www.cnet.com/news/google-mozilla-av1-photo-format-
co...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-mozilla-av1-photo-format-could-outdo-
aging-jpeg/)), and tests
([https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/av1stilldemo/](https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/av1stilldemo/))
look great.

The .heic format now used by iPhones is the same idea
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format)).
But wider use of that is going to be constrained by the cost problem HEVC has
in general (two patent pools to deal with). Some of WebP is based on VP8 (not
VP9) intra coding too.

There are a lot of tools packed in AV1's intra coding (and HEVC's, though I've
read less about that). Block sizes range from 4x4 to 64x64 and there's a mix
within one image, so the encoder can use the right size for the level of
detail in each area. There are more ways to predict a block's content from
what's to the top and left, which leaves less work for the JPEGish DCT part.
There's clever de-ringing post-processing that, in effect, blurs away many of
the attention-getting JPEG-y DCT artifacts around edges, while 1) being aware
of the direction of the main edge itself to avoid blurring that away and 2)
using contrast thresholds to preserve as much other legitimate detail as it
can--more about deringing at
[https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/deringing_demo/](https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/deringing_demo/)
.

(There's some good detailed discussion at [https://parisvideotech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/07/AOM-AV...](https://parisvideotech.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/07/AOM-AV1-Video-Tech-meet-up.pdf) and in Wikipedia's
page at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1)
)

Relatedly, given the complexity, I wouldn't expect this to, like, take the
world by storm in the next three months. The unoptimized encoder is still
_really_ slow. Google has designed a hardware implementation, but of course
hardware designs take time to get integrated, fabbed, and into shipping
products. Given who's involved, I'm hopeful it does get wide support. (Would
love to hear Apple's plans given their current support for x265; their
decision to join AOMedia is a good sign at least.) Anyway, looking forward to
seeing the results.

~~~
floatboth
> Some of WebP is based on VP8 (not VP9) intra coding too

Quite an understatement. "Some" here means WebP is literally a single VP8
frame shoved into a RIFF container :D

Back in the day (holy shit 8 years ago already!) there was a script that added
WebP support to WebM-supporting browsers by literally changing the container.
Here it is:
[https://github.com/antimatter15/weppy/blob/master/weppy.js](https://github.com/antimatter15/weppy/blob/master/weppy.js)

~~~
twotwotwo
> "Some" here means WebP is literally a single VP8 frame shoved into a RIFF
> container :D

Though it's less used than the lossy format, lossless WebP is a thing too; if
I said WebP was exactly VP8 intra someone might nitpick that. There's no
winning, haha!

------
forgot-my-pw
Been a long time coming. Hoping to see some benchmarks and reviews soon.

------
sorenjan
Is ffmpeg able to encode to AV1?

~~~
mulvya
No. With the bitstream only just frozen, I expect decoder/encoder wrappers for
libaom to take a few months.

~~~
Daemon404
The bitstream isn't frozen yet.

As an aside: A wrapper within FFmpeg for libaom is only a few hours work, but
if you want to play with it Right Now, VLC has support. A native decoder will
indeed take significantly longer though.

~~~
mulvya
_A wrapper within FFmpeg for libaom is only a few hours work_

Batteries and bikeshedding on the Devel ML not included...

~~~
Daemon404
I was mistaken, one is already written, but not merged.

So we're already in bikeshed mode ;)

~~~
mulvya
Mea culpa.

Already added -
[http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=0dc11d8bbd4...](http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=0dc11d8bbd470db89fbc17b7434e992c9129b310)
and
[http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=99cc3cf7a26...](http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=99cc3cf7a26cd4113e5047034577027d8c6f07a2)

