VVenC 1.8 Released For Speeding Up Open-Source H.266/VVC Encoding

[rob-tech]

Isn't AV1 still the preferred choice, I heard that this has very restrictive licensing and other problems compared to AV1?

[brucethemoose]

Well, good that people are finally waking up to AOMedia Group.

I dunno. The outrage over the JPEG XL incident has died down, and even if it didn't, it seems most people didnt connect this to the aomedia people at Google who made/approved the commits.

I am fine with lots of AVIF/AV1 zealousy... but sabotaging other codecs is crossing a line.

My guess is that h.266 is already dead in all Google products, even if it has some legitimate niches.

[brucethemoose]

Isn't AV1 still the preferred choice, I heard that this has very restrictive licensing and other problems compared to AV1?

Setting the problematic licensing aside, h.266 has a potentially better bitrate and supports some niche formats and features that AV1 doesn't, but its still under development. Its probably "in between" AV1 and AV2.


But yeah, the licensing thing is going to be a forever problem like it was for HEVC. The world largely ignoring h.264's licensing issues was kinda a fluke.

[markg85]

The JPEG XL incident has made me more wary of the aomedia group.

Not that I have a problem with AV1... but maybe a viable competitor and a counterweight to aomedia's zealosy is good.

You might be mixing things here and coming to wrong conclusions because of it.

The aomedia group is responsible for the creation of AV1 and AVIF. They have no say in browser standards.
Google - with chromium as base for many browsers - has a stupidly high market dominance. This essentially gives google the power to define the future of the web. Power they imho abused to push out JPEG XL in favor of their co-founded AV1/AVIF codec.

It's not aomedia that's questionable in this matter, there's more HECV/H.265 alternatives out there.

Or in other terms, we need more different browsers and by that i mean browsers that have their own engine that isn't chromium based. Given today's super complex web with the many hundreds (thousands?) of specifications, that's not going to happen anytime soon. Even microsoft with all their money abandoned their (trident) engine for chromium.

[Quackdoc]

Isn't AV1 still the preferred choice, I heard that this has very restrictive licensing and other problems compared to AV1?

yes. I presume most streaming services will use AV1, with a few using VVC. but VVC will mostly be relegated to physical media

The JPEG XL incident has made me more wary of the aomedia group.

Not that I have a problem with AV1... but maybe a viable competitor and a counterweight to aomedia's zealosy is good.

it isn't AOM thats the issue, it was the devs of the reference encoder, many "aom's zealots" are mostly pro JXL. in fact, I havent seen very many people including in various av1 groups that were anti JXL. well, AOM does have problems, they aren't very open lol.

This essentially gives google the power to define the future of the web. Power they imho abused to push out JPEG XL in favor of their co-founded AV1/AVIF codec.
...
Or in other terms, we need more different browsers and by that i mean browsers that have their own engine that isn't chromium based. Given today's super complex web with the many hundreds (thousands?) of specifications, that's not going to happen anytime soon. Even microsoft with all their money abandoned their (trident) engine for chromium.

not google, the chromium team, google isn't some tight nit small buisness, multiple google employees were on the issue tracker asking for chrome team to reverse the decision, libjxl 3 (maybe 4) of the top 5 contributors are google employees.

as for other browsers I agree, but the answer isn't firefox, there are still patches sitting in firefox's tracker (that were recently merged into waterfox if you wanted to try them) that bring JXL into a phenomenal state. however they have been sitting there, untouched rotting away.

saschanaz added a comment.Aug 11 2021, 9:29 AM
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Hi @wwwwwwww, sorry for the long delay.

I think we'll prioritize AVIF for now, so right now we are not actively investing in this, given that we have limited resource. It's okay to keep the patches posted, but I don't think merging will happen in the foreseeable future.

I'm very sorry for that, especially with your other recent works. But still, thank you for your contribution.

https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D119700

Never forget mozilla claimed to be netural on JXL when they refuse to look into so far as merging these patches, for a feature which is behind a flag, only on nightly, as yes, so much extra maintenance, mozilla which seems to only be good for being the "counter balance to chrome". cannot be bothered to so much as work on such a highly requested feature. when most of the work to get it into a usable state is already done.

Im hoping that servo, with it's renewed development effort, can at the very least be used as a webkit alternative and we can build a browser around that.

[markg85]

not google, the chromium team, google isn't some tight nit small buisness, multiple google employees were on the issue tracker asking for chrome team to reverse the decision, libjxl 3 (maybe 4) of the top 5 contributors are google employees.

That's just nitpicking
It's google. Sure, you can define it further down to the people on the chromium team and those on the AV1 team. But google is paying them.
I'\m fine saying it's Chromium's fault though.

Never forget mozilla claimed to be netural on JXL when they refuse to look into so far as merging these patches, for a feature which is behind a flag, only on nightly, as yes, so much extra maintenance, mozilla which seems to only be good for being the "counter balance to chrome". cannot be bothered to so much as work on such a highly requested feature. when most of the work to get it into a usable state is already done.

Im hoping that servo, with it's renewed development effort, can at the very least be used as a webkit alternative and we can build a browser around that.

Firefox is... so incredible conservative. New innovations in terms of new features for the web isn't coming from them (i'm generalizing, it's not this black/white). New technical innovations - like servo and don't forget rust - are under the mozilla umbrella which is awesome!

What i think we need most is a web standards organisation - w3c - that is there for the users. Us! Right now i feel like they are there for browser vendors (thus essentially, due to market share, ruled by google) while they should be there for the users. Then again, their progress is so super slow that you need "pushy browsers" to get them moving which is also exactly how one vendor can push for a different image format then users want. (do note that much of what i say here is assumption based, i'm not claiming these to be facts! Just to be my perceived opinion of the situation)

[Quackdoc]

That's just nitpicking
It's google. Sure, you can define it further down to the people on the chromium team and those on the AV1 team. But google is paying them.
I'\m fine saying it's Chromium's fault though.

it really isn't nitpicking, the chrome team is completely separate from the folk working on mozilla, however there is allegedly overlap between the aomenc team and the chromium team.

Firefox is... so incredible conservative. New innovations in terms of new features for the web isn't coming from them (i'm generalizing, it's not this black/white). New technical innovations - like servo and don't forget rust - are under the mozilla umbrella which is awesome!

What i think we need most is a web standards organisation - w3c - that is there for the users. Us! Right now i feel like they are there for browser vendors (thus essentially, due to market share, ruled by google) while they should be there for the users. Then again, their progress is so super slow that you need "pushy browsers" to get them moving which is also exactly how one vendor can push for a different image format then users want. (do note that much of what i say here is assumption based, i'm not claiming these to be facts! Just to be my perceived opinion of the situation)

servo and rust haven't been under mozilla for a very long time now, parts of servo like spider monkey still are, thanks to open source, but the main developers working on servo are now (barely) funded my linux foundation, and a couple devs brought on by igallia. I don't think anything that is *good* remains under mozilla.

deepspeech is now maintained under coqui, (STT and TTS)
Send instances are now community maintained
Rust is now indepenant
servo is now under linux foundation

Im not sure of any "forward thinking" technology that is any decent that mozilla is still developing, what we need is browsers willing to implement features that users wish to have. neither mozilla nor the chrome team are willing to do this. technically speaking, webkit supports JXL I guess.

[tuxd3v]

lots of codecs and stuff..
h264 is and will continue to be king..
I have h264 encoding/decoding acceleration, and its enough for me.

What can you benefit from with other codecs?
more bandwidth, more storage size, more processing waisted on it, it only brings pollution in the world to a even higher degree.. and almost no one can benefit from them.

[Quackdoc]

lots of codecs and stuff..
h264 is and will continue to be king..
I have h264 encoding/decoding acceleration, and its enough for me.

What can you benefit from with other codecs?
more bandwidth, more storage size, more processing waisted on it, it only brings pollution in the world to a even higher degree.. and almost no one can benefit from them.

arguing h264 is more green" when it comes to codecs is stupid, but i'll humor the thought.

if anything AV1 and higher compressed codecs are "more green" you encode one file with av1, and if you are a large distributor, you save terabytes of bandwidth with a small decode penalty, bandwidth costs money and electricity too

netflix's murder mystery 2 clocked 64,420,000hrs of total watch time between March 27 and April 2. assuming a base of 17mbps which is what I have routinely seen, that's 2.52 petabytes. assuming a measly 20% bitrate savings, which is often far less then what you get about 2.02 petabytes of bandwidth. that's roughly 500 terabytes of bandwidth saved by converting all that bandwidth to av1. for one video for one week.

it has LONG been known that bandwidth is "dirty" though estimates on how much vary widely. even given the more conservative estimates you can find, even assuming swdec, encoding av1, and using that, will save so much bandwidth, that it would make h264 seem like a coal.

it's a stupid argument anyways because when it comes to hwenc, which is what many of these services use, it uses next to no additional energy usage then h264. and more and more devices are comming out with hwdec, which puts that in the same position

[kn00tcn]

still no binaries, why?

I've noticed that WebP has become commonly used for the photos and graphics on news sites now. Sometimes you can manipulate the URL to get a JPEG or PNG instead, sometimes not. I've even seen AVIF a couple of times, although it's much less common.
...
Having said all that, I hope AV2 is coming soon and crushes everything the Moving Picture Experts Group has to offer.

manipulating the http 'accepts' header seems to work better, there are too many urls that pretend to be 'jpg' or 'png', but serve webp

imgx cdn seems to do it in order when you disable the accepts one at a time, avif->webp->original jpg/png, as seen on humblebundle's site, easily tested with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...t-accept-webp/

borat: i will crush mpeg!



EDIT: what's infuriating about webp is almost every site uses it wrong with obvious quality loss compared to jpg then claiming it saves bandwidth... how about you just reduce the jpg settings, a similar problem may be happening with vp9 vs h264 videos