
First release of dav1d, the AV1 decoder - nimbs
http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2018/First-release-of-dav1d
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ksec
I am thinking if H.264 AVC will be like Jpeg, where the worse is actually
better. They are ubiquitous, and hardware decode in visually all Smartphone,
and seems to be good enough for a lot of cases (non-4K usage).

But it is still nice to see AV1 coming along, especially coming from VLC
(dav1d) and Xiph ( rav1e ) .

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Wowfunhappy
Agreed, but I'm very curious which codec (h265 or av1) will eventually "win"
in the 4K+ and HDR space.

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xienze
Perhaps AV1 will in the loooong term, but as of today h265 is what every 4K
Blu-Ray uses and just about every modern device has a hardware decoder. So
that’s gotta count for something.

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pilif
H.265 is a much worse patent minefield than h.264 ever was: the h.265 patents
are owned by different patent pools with different licensing terms, some of
which even without revenue cap.

The only way to relatively safely produce h.265 content is to be one of these
companies in one of the patent pools.

AV1 in contrast is supposed to be free of patents and open for everybody to
use. Of course there could still be some patent being violated and there's no
legal entity to fight for you if you get sued, but given the mess around
h.265, this might still be the better option.

AV1 is backed by multiple soft- and hardware manufacturers, so between that,
the free licensing, and the legal murkiness of h.265, this might yet take off.

I certainly hope so. It would be the first time in decades that the best media
codec is also patent free and useable by everybody.

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ksec
>AV1 in contrast is supposed to be free of patents

It is not, it never was, and never will be. It is only Royalty Free.

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skygazer
"free of patents" is like atomic hydrogen; a very short lived state in
practice.

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phonon
Ummm...kinda the opposite? The terminal value is always "patent free" :-)

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dang
Two recent discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18504930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18504930)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18114698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18114698)

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randyrand
how are the optimized encoders coming along? last i remember it was 1000x
slower to encode than typical.

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BurningCycles
Last I saw, the official AV1 encoder had gone down to 16x slower than VP9, but
that was a couple of months ago so things might have improved further.

Also there's rav1e which bodly claims to be the fastest (and safest) AV1
encoder, but it's still in early development so it probably doesn't make any
sense in benchmarking it at this stage.

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phkahler
When is this coming to Firefox?

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clouddrover
I tried it out in Firefox 65 beta. You can enable dav1d via about:config by
setting "media.av1.use-dav1d" to true.

dav1d seems to perform worse than libaom for me on some videos I tried. I have
a 2014 MacBook Pro with a 2.2ghz Haswell i7 (i.e. with AVX2).

Firefox using libaom struggles to play YouTube AV1 video at 1080p60 on my
system. It gets to a point where it drops too many frames and the video
becomes unwatchable. For example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-
KmlzD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmdb-KmlzD8)

I hoped dav1d would perform better than libaom on that particular video at
1080p60, but if anything it performs worse.

I'm not clear if that video is 8-bit or 10-bit color. If it's 10-bit color
then that would explain it because dav1d is not optimized for 10-bit video
yet.

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jbk
> dav1d seems to perform worse than libaom for me on some videos I tried.

As far as I know, the Firefox buildsystem does not compile dav1d with asm yet.
So, that is expected, for now.

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clouddrover
Ah, that explains it then. Thanks.

Hopefully they'll enable the asm code during Firefox 65 beta.

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pooloo1
That typo in the first bullet of the "Release" section is really bothersome to
me oddly. Less know ones... less know... know... blah

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thomastjeffery
That's the trouble with spellcheck. It can't tell you that you are using the
incorrect real word.

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SquareWheel
There are grammar checkers that can pick up on those errors. Microsoft Word
has one built in (green underline versus red).

