AV1 Decoder dav1d Lands 10-bit AVX2 Assembly For Big Speed-Up, Thanks Facebook + Netflix

[Danniello]

Very nice

Fate's irony - Netflix contribute something to open-source project but in the same time - it cannot be used for Netflix content in Linux.

I mean: Netflix 10-bit 4K content has insane DRM requirements - there is no free Linux distribution that could handle it. Only commercial forks like Android on dedicated hardware could handle it.

No HDR support in Linux distributions it is another story, but at least in this area there is some progress...

[Quackdoc]

I hope this unlocks more 10-bit content. For those that may not know, 8-bit encoding does not save any space (on the contrary, you need more bitrate to avoid banding). It only makes sense for decoding performance.

It will for some stuff, but 10-bit encoding can still be pretty brutal on devices. I can just barely watch 4k 10-bit content on a custom build of mpv-android with compiler optimizations on my s9+ I think it will be a little while longer yet, but it is definitely a large step.

[Quackdoc]

Hm interesting, I've never heard this argument before, the only thing I heard was that jpegxl is better than or equal to AVIF at everything.

Yeah, Animation gets the short end of the stick all the time despite gifs still being so prominent and webp not being an all that better solution. animations take up a crap ton of room. and there is value in separating animations from videos, even audio-less ones. the least amount of room you allow someone to mess something up the better. and just from a management perspective its nice to have a hard seperation.

I beg to differ. Software decoding causes my laptop's fans to spin up like crazy. Firefox recently optimized their hardware decoding to be about 50 % more efficient than in previous versions, so now the difference should be pretty major, although I haven't tried that. But even video players are horribly slow in software rendering mode.

I can almost play 1080p 8bit 30fps on my dual core celeron n3050. soon hopefully with more optimization it might become possible

[andreano]

I hope this unlocks more 10-bit content. For those that may not know, 8-bit encoding does not save any space (on the contrary, you need more bitrate to avoid banding). It only makes sense for decoding performance.

[loganj]

can't av1 be decoded with cuda/opencl/whatever?

[cl333r]

AVIF pales in comparison to jpegxl for stills, but far exceeds it in animations due to the video encoding capabilities of av1.

but no one seems to care about it as firefox STILL cannot ay avif animations (Chrome has been able to for a long time now).

Hm interesting, I've never heard this argument before, the only thing I heard was that jpegxl is better than or equal to AVIF at everything.

[Pieryck]

I beg to differ. Software decoding causes my laptop's fans to spin up like crazy. Firefox recently optimized their hardware decoding to be about 50 % more efficient than in previous versions, so now the difference should be pretty major, although I haven't tried that. But even video players are horribly slow in software rendering mode.

I have been using AV1 since it's been made publicly usable on YouTube using my i7 6700HQ (and its HD530) on Windows 10 and Google Chrome, and CPU usage is high sure, but at 1080p60 (8bit, SDR) it does not go higher than 20-30%, it can even play 2160p60 (still 8bit SDR though) without any stuttering (reaching something like 80% CPU usage of course, it's still software rendering at extreme resolution for such an old hardware), and that's on a 6 years old CPU with obviously no HW acceleration

Actually, I don't exactly know how it's using the CPU but I noticed that at like 1080p30 it may be using around 20-30% CPU but it keeps its clock pretty low, around 0.9 to 2.0GHz, while it's a CPU that go up to 3.2GHz on all cores and 3.5GHz using single core, so it definitely still has a lot of headroom.

So sure, SW rendering is heavy, but on a 6 years old high end mobile CPU, it runs like a charm, surprisingly, which is why I also activated AV1 onall resolutions and also noticed a very large amount of videos being encoded with it (basically every single music video are AV1) and it's only getting faster, and from memory, Chrome isn't even using dav1d but its own sx decoder

[curfew]

Nearly all videos that are AV1 on Youtube are 8bit and 8bit is already fast on nearly all CPUs.

I beg to differ. Software decoding causes my laptop's fans to spin up like crazy. Firefox recently optimized their hardware decoding to be about 50 % more efficient than in previous versions, so now the difference should be pretty major, although I haven't tried that. But even video players are horribly slow in software rendering mode.

[Toggleton]

I hope Firefox picks up these optimizations soon. My next processor will be Cézanne without hw acceleration, but I will still unblock AV1 on Youtube since software decode will be fast enough.

Nearly all videos that are AV1 on Youtube are 8bit and 8bit is already fast on nearly all CPUs. Would be nice if they would bring 10bit cause banding is a problem on Youtube.
In this playlist are videos that have a av1 10bit(+HDR) version but even if you set Youtube to "always prefer AV1" it does not serve it in firefox on a ryzen3600.
With youtube-dl - f 401+251 URL
will you get the av1 version to test it (399=1080p 400=1440p 401=4k)

[scineram]

I hope Firefox picks up these optimizations soon. My next processor will be Cézanne without hw acceleration, but I will still unblock AV1 on Youtube since software decode will be fast enough.