A 2018 Status Update On The Royalty-Free AV1 Video Codec

[dwagner]

I wonder why they dropped the Daala transforms (daala_tx). Was it simply too late? Maybe they can reconsider for AV2.

Pro's and Con's are listed at https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/

[andreano]

I wonder why they dropped the Daala transforms (daala_tx). Was it simply too late? Maybe they can reconsider for AV2.

[zanny]

AV1 better take the time it needs to get things right, because the stars will never align like this again. It doesn't matter if we wait a generation of devices for harware decoding if the codec is defective. Once hardware decoders start landing that is it, thats the AV1 we are stuck with.

[edwaleni]

Interesting primer on how to optimize AV1 using AVX2.

After rewriting, we noticed the following speedups:

• 240p: 1%–5% depending on mode. As this is the lowest resolution, the DSP routines take a small amount of time relative to other things.
• 480p: Similar to the previous case; up to 7% sometimes.
• 720p: 5%–15% depending on mode. Speedup increased as DSP became more important in terms of time.
• 1080p: Very similar to 720p.

[ssokolow]

Youtube and Netflix are using it and it's supported out of the box (if not default) on all Android devices. But yeah, apart from that, no traction at all ;-)

To be fair to Mr. Octus, both Youtube and Android are "within company with the hardware to encode it" (ie. Alphabet nee Google).

[shmerl]

Daala was one of the precursors to AV1. Basically Daala, VP10 and a couple of others merged their efforts to develop AV1.

That doesn't answer the question. Daala is significantly different from AV1 overall, to be worth continuing developing it on its own. But Mozilla hit some technical roadblock they didn't manage to solve at that moment. Now looks like active development has stopped.

Daala wasn't fully merged into AV1, only some parts of it. Its core idea of using lapped transforms was not for instance.

[jacob]

vp9 still hasn't gained any traction besides within company with the hardware to encode it.

Youtube and Netflix are using it and it's supported out of the box (if not default) on all Android devices. But yeah, apart from that, no traction at all ;-)

[jacob]

What happened to Daala though after they hit some technical roadblocks? Will Mozilla still work on it, or it will be abandoned going forward?

Daala was one of the precursors to AV1. Basically Daala, VP10 and a couple of others merged their efforts to develop AV1.

[shmerl]

Will there be some royalty-free, or even free-as-in-freedom hardware implementations as well

At least it should be possible since codec itself is free.

[M@yeulC]

Will there be some royalty-free, or even free-as-in-freedom hardware implementations as well (HDL code)? Is this one of the goals of the alliance? We almost tried to have a go at implementing one for our final school project with a friend, but realized there might already be some WIP on this.