AOMedia Announces Public Release Of AV1 Video Format

[starshipeleven]

It is relevant because if you use Kodi on your HTPC and the DRM can only be used with software decoding due to architecture limits than it becomes important how fast your cpus have to be to decode it in realtime for 720p,1080p or even 4k material. Hardware decoding won't help at all there as it can't be used.

DRM is Digital Rights Management. That's restrictions to ensure that people do not copy/clone/steal the media they are streaming or have bought.

AV1 is a codec, a compression algorithm to compress raw video into a smaller media file.

So no, DRM is not relevant here.

[RealNC]

I thought VP9 was the format taking on h.265? So now we have three?

[starshipeleven]

I thought VP9 was the format taking on h.265? So now we have three?

VP10, the successor of VP9, was turned into AV1. So it seems VP9 will eventually be retired in favor of AV1.

[iugamarian]

I am very glad that all kinds of people and companies realize that Free and Open Source software means less spending and more funding. Because you are not limited or locked. You can evolve away, step by step. Slowly or in this AV1 case blistering fast.

[stqn]

Unfortunately if it is so slow to encode it means that nobody will use it.

[smitty3268]

I thought VP9 was the format taking on h.265? So now we have three?

AV1 is the successor to VP9, and it was actually targeted at taking on the successor to h.265. (h.266?)

The change here is that this was put out early enough that it's out and can get established before whatever the MPEG group does rather than coming along 2nd and playing catchup.

[Gusar]

Unfortunately if it is so slow to encode it means that nobody will use it.

The focus until now was determining the bitstream format, speed was not a priority. This changes now that the bitstream is final. libaom itself will get improved and there will be other independent implementations.

[ZeDestructor]

It is relevant because if you use Kodi on your HTPC and the DRM can only be used with software decoding due to architecture limits than it becomes important how fast your cpus have to be to decode it in realtime for 720p,1080p or even 4k material. Hardware decoding won't help at all there as it can't be used.

That's just straight up wrong. The full AACS2 chain requires full hardware decode in the GPU via a protected AV path, specifically excluding software decoding. The idea is that the raw frame gets decrypted and decoded on the GPU, composited in your desktop (or fullscreen) and sent encrypted directly to your monitor. You can, of course, still break that chain (in multiple places) with enough time and effort.

As always when a new more efficient codec comes along, it throws more complex math at the problem, which means it's going to be slooooooooow. 50% increase in compression ratio for a lossy video codec usually comes at a price of 10-20 times longer encoding times.

It's an order of magnitude slower when encoding, for starters.

Unfortunately if it is so slow to encode it means that nobody will use it.

Relax guys. Given nV, Intel, ARM and Apple are founding members, and AMD, Realtek and Broadcom are promoter members, the pure dedicated hardware encoders and decoders will be out very soon. For now, I suspect a GPU-accelerated (CUDA/OpenCL) decoder will be used in hybrid mode with hardware VP9/HEVC hardware blocks, similar to how nV Maxwell did HEVC decode.

On the software/media side, Google/Youtube, Netflix and amazon will ram AV1 down everyone's throats so hard that anyone not on that list will give up and add support anyways, similar to how everyone added H.263/DivX/XviD support to everything thanks to the piracy scene picking XviD as the codec of choice. So relax more, Qualcomm, Samsung, HiSilicon, MediaTek and all the other myriad vendors will shut up and put up... at least for the decoder (though with GooTube pushing it, they'll probably add an encoder too).

[Tomin]

Unfortunately if it is so slow to encode it means that nobody will use it.

I think the encoding speed is more relevant for people encoding their videos and less relevant for Google and other big companies that can use as much hardware as they like. I'm pretty sure somebody will use it.

[wizard69]

Sorry to disturb your dream and lower your expectations, but have you read the list of invovled enterprises? It reads like a collection of who is the nastiest? (yeah, spare me with Mozilla...)
Adobe = DRM and crap purely.
Amazon = evil, also content provider
Apple = do we really have to even think of the inventors of golden cages?
Facebook = haha!
(their only interest in this group might be some bandwidth / server storage savings for uploaded media)
Google = capable tech staff, for sure, but a Janus head. Mega-Data-collector and privacy invader.
IBM = lolwut, I thought they were dead
(once, back in the days of mechanical keyboards, this was a tech invention force, but now, what are they now? The probably don't even know for themselves!)
Intel = evil, inventors of CPU serial numbers, TCPA / TPM, fTPM, HDCP, Meltdown and all sorts of crap
Microsoft = hahahahahaha OMFG!
Mozilla = meh
Netflix = content provider, forces people to have fTPM to watch their (hires) content
NVIDIA = yeah, sure. The benefactor of freedom software in person.

Honestly, I would not expect much battle here. And maybe Mozilla will deliver a non-DRM variant officially, that is only capable of playing "elephant's dream" as the sole video in this codec world-wide, while all others will have the DRM variant and content will be nailed down with DRM.

Sorry for not being more optimistic, but I have >25 years of experience with that stuff and it would be a (pleasant) surprise if it was different this time.

So everyone is evil! Nice world you live in.