DAV1D: A New AV1 Video Decoder From The VideoLAN Developers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DAV1D: A New AV1 Video Decoder From The VideoLAN Developers

The VideoLAN/VLC developers in conjunction with the FFmpeg crew while being sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media have announced a new AV1 video decoder...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DAV1D-AV1-Decoder

[M@yeulC]

One thing I've been curious about is SVC (Scalable Video) support in ffmpeg and AV1. Do both of these projects support codecs of this kind? Is there a standard for serialization?

[jacob]

That's good, but what we need urgently is an ENCODER.

[davidbepo]

i like the name

[calc]

That's good, but what we need urgently is an ENCODER.

Hardware accelerated decoding for processors would also be nice, otherwise its mostly just a toy.

[jacob]

Hardware accelerated decoding for processors would also be nice, otherwise its mostly just a toy.

Not necessarily. Out of curiosity I tried to encode a video with a custom-built version of ffmpeg. VLC 4.0.0~dev (at least the build in snap's edge channel) plays it very well, on a laptop that's far from being a powerhouse (Core i7-6600U with Intel gfx). In fact I didn't observe any difference in replay smoothness compared with HEVC. The efficiency of this codec seems very impressive, in my officially non-scientific and non-comprehensive tests, you can encode at 1/3rd of the bitrate used by AVC with no discernable loss of quality. The problem is that the encoder is currently so slow that it's unusable. Of course it will always have higher CPU requirements than AVC or even HEVC during encoding, that's expected, but at the moment it runs at about about 0.1-0.2 fps (or between 5 to 10 SECONDS PER FRAME) on this machine.

[emblemparade]

As a grizzly old C coder it's a joy to browse through the codebase. Very straightforward, everything is there for a reason, and there's no cruft. Even the multithreading is custom-built for exactly the purpose of the decoder.

[Shnatsel]

It baffles me why people write new security-critical software in C in 2018. Especially something as notoriously prone to memory errors as video decoder. Rust should have been a no-brainer.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I'm assuming you meant to say, C11, with the emphasis on correctly multi-threaded, seeing as that's one of the main features of C11, along with atomic primitives and types, bounds checking, floating point arithmetic and complex mathematics lib, never mind standard analyzability?

I'm waiting for the RUST crowd to crap the bed.

[pal666]

That's good, but what we need urgently is an ENCODER.

we don't, youtube encodes videos without our help