
Cisco Leap Frogs H.264 Video Collaboration with Real-Time AV1 Codec - clouddrover
https://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/cisco-leap-frogs-h-264-video-collaboration-with-real-time-av1-codec
======
CWuestefeld
In my experience, the weakness of current conferencing systems isn't in the
software - it's a hardware problem.

Specifically, their ability to capture and transmit usable speech is really
poor. Between echo and poor noise gating, I'm not exaggerating when I say that
I can make out fewer than 1/3 of the words in my team's conference calls.

I don't care how efficient the video codec is, if I can't clearly understand
what the other people are saying, it's all useless.

~~~
innagadadavida
Great opportunity for someone to combine a HomePod, appletv and iPad solution.

~~~
slimscsi
That sounds expensive for no reason.

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chubs
Coincidentally i'm trying out rav1e today (the open-source command line av1
encoder). At 1080p for a 2m40s movie trailer on a current-model mac mini
6-core, it's running at 0.153FPS. That means it's running at 157x slower than
real-time. Kudos to these cisco chaps for being roughly 157x faster than
rav1e!

~~~
ksec
You simply turn off all the tools that are slow, and you end up with an AV1
encode that is very fast, but quality wont be anywhere close to your _normal_
AV1 encode.

I don't doubt it will be of higher quality than AVC. After all AVC was the
work started pre 2000 and published in 2003.

~~~
derf_
It is easy to dismiss what Cisco demonstrated like this, but if you listen to
the talk, they argue that having _more_ tools available gives you more room to
optimize for quality per bit _per cycle_ , in the same way that having more
choices allows you to optimize better for just quality per bit (or any other
objective, really). So it's not just a matter of turning things off, but of
making good choices.

It is also not just beating AVC. They claim that it is higher quality than
their own HEVC work, which they invested in heavily before it become clear
that the licensing situation was not going to just "work itself out". They
once told us that even they were surprised how many of the HEVC tools you
could wind up using for real time, if you used them judiciously (basically:
all of them).

I have worked with some of the team responsible for this project before, and
we collaborated with them on some AV1 tools (most notably the CDEF loop
filter, but also entropy coding and a few other things). They know their
stuff, and really do seem to be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else on the
RTC side of things.

------
kimburgess
Talk here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op-
rzboJ_1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op-rzboJ_1Q)

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stefan_
Real-time is such an unfortunate term when talking about video collaboration.
A codec that can achieve real-time encoding speed is still useless if it has a
10 frame latency to output the first data, and arguably not _real-time_.

~~~
morerunes
~1/3 second is perfectly acceptable to me to be within the range of "real
time", and is quick enough that I'd be willing to bet most people won't notice
even in a two way conversation.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
For live streaming and chat that's fairly acceptable. However, don't forget
there are other potential use cases, particularly since cloud gaming is
supposedly becoming a thing again.

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ragerino
Great to see improvements on the AV1 encoding side. I remembered reading
something similar coming from Europe -> Allegro DVT AL-E210.

[http://www.allegrodvt.com/products/silicon-
ips/al-e210/](http://www.allegrodvt.com/products/silicon-ips/al-e210/)

How does your solution compare to Allegros one?

~~~
snops
Cisco are not using dedicated hardware logic like Allegro DVT I think. For
phones etc, dedicated hardware will be very useful, but it takes time to get
into products, which is why a real time CPU encoder is very interesting.

Looking at the video
([https://vimeo.com/344366650](https://vimeo.com/344366650)) of the Cisco
talk, at 20m18s they say a "real time low latency HD _software_ encoder"
[emphasis added], which confirms it.

------
Causality1
When can we expect to see hardware AV1 encoding/decoding in mobile SoCs?

~~~
clouddrover
It's starting to happen. Here's a SoC announcement from Realtek for AV1
decoding:

[https://www.realtek.com/en/press-room/news-
releases/item/rea...](https://www.realtek.com/en/press-room/news-
releases/item/realtek-launches-worldwide-first-4k-uhd-set-top-box-soc-
rtd1311-integrating-av1-video-decoder-and-multiple-cas-functions)

~~~
ksec
>hardware AV1 encoding/decoding in _mobile_ SoCs?

~~~
arghwhat
"Mobile" is subjective. There are laptops with desktop chipsets after all...
Who stops a phone from having a set-top box chip? :)

~~~
errantspark
Fair enough, but those laptops are meant to be used tethered to a power
source. Set top box chips are generally far more power hungry than their
mobile counterparts, just like desktop chips vs laptop chips. The issue here
is that I'm not sure there's much of a market for phones that don't work on
battery for more than 15 minutes.

Then again, there's a market for water-cooling blocks for phones so I guess
anything is possible.

~~~
arghwhat
Those laptops do come with a battery, though, so someone out there is enjoying
a whole 22 minutes of battery capacity.

In all seriousness, though, integration into a set top box chip is a sign of
commodity: A low power chip with limited application, where it is implemented
not to power a large marketing department, but simply out of potential
necessity.

This is to me a far bigger indicator of "things coming soon" than, say,
integration into a high-end GPU.

------
kalleboo
So how far away is it until my phone can record 4K @ 60fps like it can with
HEVC? I'm guessing we'll need hardware support built on these optimizations?

~~~
slimscsi
My guess, 5 years. And the cisco “optimizations” May work well for a
conference call with a perfectly still camera and low spacial and temporal
information density. Applying the same techniques to handheld action video
would produce very poor results.

------
thruhiker
I haven't used Webex or any Cisco conferencing offerings recently but I have
been very impressed by Zoom. It works really well when using computer audio
with AirPods. I've used this setup for meetings across continents without
thought to latency. This may be a result of Internet connections improving in
general. I found video conferencing to be distracting in the past but
surprisingly good now.

------
p0nce
Well, real-time 4kp60 HEVC encoding is a reality since 2014
[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140904005279/en](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140904005279/en)

Since that time HEVC encoding has only become faster and less expensive.

This real-time AV1 encoder achieves 1080p30, which is simply speaking 8 times
less pixels than that 2014 demo. And compares against H.264 which says it all.

~~~
clouddrover
> _And compares against H.264 which says it all_

They compared against HEVC as well. To quote the article: _" This means that
we can substantially raise quality, while saving bits, all with a very usable
CPU footprint. We have found that the real-world compression/speed trade-offs
for AV1 are in fact excellent, and better than HEVC."_

And the business problem with HEVC is: _" HEVC (aka H.265) comes with
unacceptable patent cost, risk and uncertainty."_

~~~
p0nce
It hasn't stopped HEVC from winning
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgE8-4rcXl0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgE8-4rcXl0)

~~~
clouddrover
What do you believe HEVC is winning? The major online video platforms
(YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, Twitch, etc.) are all going to AV1.

HEVC had its shot but the terrible licensing stunted its growth and AV1 will
replace it. Leonardo Chiariglione says the MPEG business model is broken and I
think he's right:

[http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-
solut...](http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/)

~~~
p0nce
Leonardo Chiariglione also said "AOM will certainly give much needed stability
to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not
entirely halted technical progress. "

which is a very real concern. (a bit tired arguing with people defending
Google's contraption vs a codec with innovation from dozens of companies)

~~~
metildaa
AV1 is not jut Google's child, but rather Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel,
Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix's collaboration to create a standard that isn't
beholden to MPEG-LA:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1)

~~~
p0nce
And who has paid the programmers on payroll on aomenc?

