The DAV1D AV1 Video Decoder Has Become Very Fast

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The DAV1D AV1 Video Decoder Has Become Very Fast

It was just two months ago that the VideoLAN/VLC crew announced the DAV1D AV1 video decoder and already it's becoming quite feature complete and super fast...

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

[wswartzendruber]

Holy dog@#$%! Does this make it faster than VLC's HEVC decoder?

[shmerl]

Great milestone! Is there some work done on making a fast encoder too? It would be critical for adopting AV1 for something like video chat / WebRTC and etc. which require realtime encoding capabilities.

[jacob]

Yeah well that's all great and everything, but I will start getting excited when there is an actually usable encoder.

[wswartzendruber]

Yeah well that's all great and everything, but I will start getting excited when there is an actually usable encoder.

Whatever. YouTube is already hosting AV1 videos. I get immediate benefit out of this...as soon as I get it.

[jacob]

Whatever. YouTube is already hosting AV1 videos. I get immediate benefit out of this...as soon as I get it.

As far as watching YouTube goes, that's true. BTW you basically are getting it already. Chromium/Chrome already supports AV1, I think (not sure about Firefox, maybe the nightly builds?) and recent VLC builds have full decoding support built-in.

But I also want to be able to re-encode my movies to minimise storage space, same thing for personal videos etc. For all that, AV1 is still the distant future.

[microcode]

Yeah well that's all great and everything, but I will start getting excited when there is an actually usable encoder.

For some people (YouTube) libaom is already somewhat practical in some cases (they encode most top-trending videos now). There is definitely a lot of work to be done on the encoder side, especially for certain types of glaring disocclusion artifacts, but it is already somewhat usable for some people, so decoder advances are welcome right now, especially if dav1d is hooked into ffmpeg (and in turn, into Chromium).

Maybe Microsoft could ship it as well, if they don't have their own software decoder ready.

[jacob]

For some people (YouTube) libaom is already somewhat practical in some cases (they encode most top-trending videos now). There is definitely a lot of work to be done on the encoder side, especially for certain types of glaring disocclusion artifacts, but it is already somewhat usable for some people, so decoder advances are welcome right now, especially if dav1d is hooked into ffmpeg (and in turn, into Chromium).

Quality is one thing, but the main issue that at the moment the libaom encoder is abysmally slow.

[microcode]

Quality is one thing, but the main issue that at the moment the libaom encoder is abysmally slow.

Well, while that may be true, it isn't stopping people from encoding large amounts of video with it right now. I fail to see your point about it somehow not mattering how fast the decoder is. Rav1e is looking promising, but you know, these things take time; and in the meantime, some people can devote a whole cluster to encoding a video chunkwise almost no matter how slow the encoder is.

The next milestone, I guess, will be getting the software encoder fast enough to do livestreams with less than a minute of latency on two-second chunks (30 encoders at 1fps).

[jacob]

Well, while that may be true, it isn't stopping people from encoding large amounts of video with it right now. I fail to see your point about it somehow not mattering how fast the decoder is. Rav1e is looking promising, but you know, these things take time; and in the meantime, some people can devote a whole cluster to encoding a video chunkwise almost no matter how slow the encoder is.

The next milestone, I guess, will be getting the software encoder fast enough to do livestreams with less than a minute of latency on two-second chunks (30 encoders at 1fps).

I think being able to encode a full-length, 1080-lines movie within 24h on ordinary hardware would be a huge progress. At the moment it would take considerably longer than 1 MONTH.