DAV1D v0.1 AV1 Video Decoder Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DAV1D v0.1 AV1 Video Decoder Released

Out today is DAV1D as the first official (v0.1) release of this leading open-source AV1 video decoder...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...1-0.1-Released

[tildearrow]

It could have been called "David".

Typo:

The dav1d 0.1 release support all AV1 format fratures

If it is complete (even if not very optimized), why call it "0.1" rather than "1.0"? Is this like umm, alpha software?

[treba]

IIRC it'll be used in firefox. Hope to see that landing soon

[Brisse]

[antnythr]

I know this is about the decoder, but man is the encoder portion ever slow. With ffmpeg from
the Arch repos (there might be better performance if I compiled from git), with default quality settings I was getting like 0.1 fps encoding. With HEVC I get about 16 fps.

I definitely won’t be doing any encoding with AV1 for a while it seems, which is unfortunate because I love that it isn’t patent encumbered.

[andreano]

firefox

Here you go: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1493397

I'm also looking forward to that.

[bpetty]

Good to see! Now we just need an efficient encoder.

[edwaleni]

But, since the previous blogpost, we've added more assembly for desktop, and we've merged some assembly for ARMv8, and for older machines (SSSE3).

We're now as fast as libaom, in single-thread, on ARMv8, and faster with more threads.

We've been also merging more SSSE3 code. (I haven't had enough time to bench it).
Which means that we will soon be faster than other decoders, on all platforms.

And, we've been experimenting with shaders, notably for the Film Grain feature.

Looking forward to the cross platform performance enhancements.

[Brisse]

Good to see! Now we just need an efficient encoder.

Indeed. There's basically zero content so far outside of what developers use for testing. Youtube has a few samples but they are very low resolution. Looks like the popular browsers will have decode support well before being able to consume actual content. It will probably stay like that until we have an efficient encoder.

[xiando]

Good to see! Now we just need an efficient encoder.

I really hope AV1 takes off and becomes a thing, just like I had hoped VP9 would amount to something. Right now encoding AV1 is so slow it's not even funny. It's bad when encoding a video file as HEVC takes 2 hours and the same file takes 3.5 hours to be encoded with VP9. That's bad but not quite past the point of forget it. AV1 encoding is currently so slow encoding a file that takes 2 hours to be encoded as HEVC would take weeks. That's not a viable alternative even if you're really enthusiastic about AV1 and open standards..

I really hope encoding time improves to the point where AV1 becomes a viable alternative. On a side-note, it's a bit sad that VP9 has been around for some time and it's still almost twice as slow as HEVC when it comes to encoding.