
DASH playback of AV1 video in Firefox - slederer
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/dash-playback-of-av1-video/
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mmastrac
Very cool. I hope we can start seeing WebAssembly-pluggable codecs in all of
the video/audio paths in the browser. Imagine being able to turn on a brand-
new codec (or select a customized codec for your particular use) in any
browser that supports WebAssembly.

Two ends of a WebRTC connection could even negotiate codecs based on
power/processing needs, with one sending a WebAssembly codec to the other as a
fallback if needed ("hey you don't support this thing that I support in
hardware, but you are plugged in, so burn some more electrons on your end").

WebAssembly SIMD [1] will definitely help with performance here.

[1]
[https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6533147810332672](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6533147810332672)

~~~
mooman219
Although there is much to be desired still on the software end, the molasses
of the situation is hardware support for the new formats. You mentioned it
briefly, but there's only so much you can do with a software decoders. H.264
may not be ideal or technically have the best performance, but most video
cards and cpu's have dedicated hardware decoders.

Completely unrealistic, but it would be interesting to have on the fly
reprogramable FPGAs on die that can be assigned specific tasks on demand. This
of course has tons of risks, but the pace that hardware moves is painful.

~~~
StudentStuff
H.265 support is a patchwork in hardware though, look at all the recent
Allwinner chips, only 8 bit H.265 playback is supported, despite quite a few
H.265 files using 10 bit colors.

Worse yet, most Chromecasts and TVs don't support anything newer than H.264.
It will be years before H.265 or any new competitor sees hardware support in
most homes.

~~~
j1elo
Probably due to H.265 having much more expensive licensing costs than H.264,
given enough volume. That alone might make lots of players in the industry to
just prefer ignoring the new codec (and joining a joint effort for developing
a new codec with more favorable licensing terms...)

~~~
StudentStuff
Yeah, VP9 will probably monopolize the market as the libre, royalty free
codec. With Google and others boosting it, I'd be surprised if it doesn't win
like Opus has in the voice codec arena for any new application.

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mariusmg
So this AV1 coded will superseed H.265 and will be truly open ? Color me
impressed if this si true.

~~~
Ace17
(AV1 dev here) Yes, this is true.

This codec is developed by the Alliance for Open Media, whose goal is to
provide a patent-free video codec (more acurately, a video codec under a
patent-umbrella protection). Let's not reproduce the HEVC fiasco (see "HEVC
advance licensing terms" for more info).

AV1 is still in development at this time (the bitstream format changes
slightly almost every day). However, the compression performance (VQ) is
already very good ; and lots of huge companies are part of the Alliance (
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Mozilla, ... see [http://aomedia.org/about-
us/](http://aomedia.org/about-us/) )

~~~
jhack
Of course Apple is nowhere to be seen. Bad enough their refusal to support VP9
is locking Safari and Apple TV users out of 4K Youtube, it's only going to
keep getting worse going forward.

~~~
lern_too_spel
There's no reason to use a Mac anymore unless you're targeting iOS. The
performance is better, the tools are better, the battery life is longer (for
laptops), the input devices are better, and the connectivity is better for
Linux development machines. Switch (TM).

~~~
rapsey
The UI experience is however atrocious. Anything is better then the death by a
thousand papercuts on Linux.

~~~
morsch
I use Mac OS, Linux and Windows to roughly the same degree. It's all fine.

I spend most of my time developing (server) software in Mac OS, and I'd rather
do it in Linux, since it seems obviously more suited to it. I'm glad I don't
have to do it in Windows, since it seems obviously less suited to it.

But it's all minor stuff. Overall it's all fine.

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shmerl
Cool!

 _> While Opus was adopted as a mandatory format for the WebRTC wire protocol,
we don’t have a similar mandate for a video codec._

Now if we could play audio in all browsers using Opus. Even Apple started
supporting Opus, but being Apple they messed things up and you can't use Ogg
container there :(

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markdog12
Very cool to finally see this in a browser. The video continually stops for me
though, although audio is still playing. Looks like it's making use of the GPU
to decode as well. Both CPU and GPU usage were pretty high for me.

Edit: I think the GPU usage was high due to using WebRender

~~~
TD-Linux
That can sometimes happen if the CPU gets too far behind. There is a bunch of
missing SIMD code at the moment - I'd expect it to be at least 4 times faster
by the time it ships.

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buckminster
AV1 is a silly name when AVI is an existing video format.

~~~
bjoli
avi isn't a video format, it is a container format. The container for av1 will
probably be mkv or MP4 (or whatever comes after)

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ajobaccount2017
Does it include DRM?

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tgsovlerkhgsel
DRM is usually implemented at a completely different layer.

