
Apple Backs AV1: What Does This Mean for the Future of Video Codecs - clouddrover
https://blog.harmonicinc.com/apple-backs-av1-what-does-this-mean-for-the-future-of-video-codecs/
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vetinari
I'm not sure, whether this propaganda piece should come with some more
warnings. The paragraphs starting with 'AV1 mythbusters' are unbelievable:

1\. The MSU report ("performance mentioned by AOM sources") with known
methodology has to be verified, but that one demo with hand picked scenes and
undocumented codec settings are totally the definitive answer.

2\. On the performance side, we don't know the complexity of the codec yet.
And on the cost side, HEVC is going to be more expensive by definition, due to
being an rent extraction scheme.

3\. You can't compare reference WIP codec with optimized one. The premise of
the entire paragraph is just wrong.

~~~
Ace17
> You can't compare reference WIP codec with optimized one. The premise of the
> entire paragraph is just wrong.

AOM dev here. Currently, aomenc takes ~100s to encode a single 4K frame. Which
means to encode live 4K 60 FPS, you need to multiply the encoding speed by
6000 (!). Indeed, the codec isn't fully optimized yet, and the required
performance improvement is huge. Of course this freaks people out!

On the other hand, reference video encoders are famous for being ridiculously
slow. The JM (H.264 ref encoder) had similar encoding times, and this didn't
stop H.264 from being encoded live.

~~~
vetinari
This was exactly my point. I remember when the JM encoder was so slow, that it
encoded 3 or 4 frames per hour. That's why 100 sec/frame for the reference
says nothing about the final performance and putting out articles creating the
"general knowledge of what everybody knows" that AV1 is slow is at best
disingenuous, at worst malicious.

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kalleboo
Joining the board doesn't mean anything about adoption. They were a part of
the Blu-ray group as well, and never shipped a Blu-ray drive

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zackkatz
This article failed to mention that Apple is a founding member of the Alliance
for Open Media, the organization that released AV1.

> Founding members are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM,
> Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and NVIDIA. >
> [aomedia.org]([https://aomedia.org](https://aomedia.org))

~~~
wmf
That's some kind of retroactive founding thing; Apple just recently joined
after AV1 was completed.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20171226163021/https://www.aomedi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20171226163021/https://www.aomedia.org/)

~~~
shmerl
Founding there apparently doesn't mean those who joined when alliance was
created, but one of the members which participates in decision making.

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adamnemecek
Sounds like Apple all right.

~~~
shmerl
Yeah, came late and now want to call the shots.

~~~
SllX
To be fair, they would be calling shots either way, either by paying up to be
a Founding member or if they couldn't do that, indirectly through their own
market power which as the makers of their own browsers and chipsets for most
of the hardware they move (and operating systems for all of their hardware),
is substantial. Working as a "Founding" member is probably easier for everyone
involved.

~~~
shmerl
I'm not saying it's a bad thing that they joined. It will be useful for
everyone. But Apple are being Apple. They just can't do the right thing from
the start.

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shmerl
_> As an industry, we hope that the HEVC licensors come up with a reasonable
and fair solution to resolving the patent licensing issues._

I don't think anyone cares about that (besides said patent holders). As an
industry, we should hope that HEVC and its approach to licensing will go bust
for good, and everyone will be using free codecs that will unshackle them from
patent protection racket.

~~~
becauseiam
It's not just patent holders who care. Harmonic sells products where a large
portion of the cost is derived from licensing codecs like AVC and HEVC. One of
their contribution encoders[1] has separate software licensing for a variety
of subsampling ratios.

1:
[https://www.harmonicinc.com/media/2017/06/Harmonic_DS_ViBE-C...](https://www.harmonicinc.com/media/2017/06/Harmonic_DS_ViBE-
CP9000.pdf)

~~~
drmpeg
They're not licensing codecs, they're licensing different versions of their
software. The HEVC fee is only 20 cents per encoder, but I'll guess those
video software options are thousands of dollars each.

~~~
TD-Linux
While HEVC fees are only a tiny fraction of their encoders, they are far
greater than 20 cents. Adding two of the pools together already nets up to
$1.40, and there are more pools with unannounced pricing yet.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_license_terms)

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Cknight70
Why has Apple still not added the ability to view webms on iOS?

~~~
pornel
The boring answer is that they've already invested in H.264, including
hardware decoding support, and it works well enough for them, so they don't
need to add support for VPx.

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mtgx
Maybe Apple will stop the nonsense and support the Vulkan API, too.

~~~
zanny
An AV codec isn't a weapon to lock developers into your platform while wasting
millions of dollars and thousands of man hours on pointless api ports. There
are too many implementations of encoders / decoders for the various formats
lying around to get away with that. Its not like they didn't try with
Quicktime in the past (ish? .mov was just a crippled .mp4), but that never
really made them any money I don't think.

~~~
CharlesW
> _.mov was just a crippled .mp4_

That's backwards — Apple contributed the Movie file format as the basis of the
MPEG-4 file format.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14#History_of_MP4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14#History_of_MP4)

