Google Releases AOM-AV1 v3.3 Video Encoder Update With Performance Improvements

[cl333r]

Using encoding like AV1, it can reduce the time it takes to download video.

This is especially true if your network is slow.

Sure, no one said people are using it only for one reason, it probably applies to most things in life.

[yump]

I just speculated, that a CPU only supporting SSE2 but not AVX is probably very old.. Using a mix of AVX/SSE is typically really slow, as changing between the modes ist expensive. At least on Intel / AMD x86.
So there are two groups:
- People with CPU older than ~6-7 years who probably won´t do AV1 encoding as the CPU is too slow to do it / it takes ages / is not ussable for live video encoding in video conferencing.
- People with CPUs that do support AVX and will use the AVX-Codepath and not SSE2..

So there is no realworld usecase for the SSE2 Encoder Codepath IMHO.. Decoding yes, but encoding?

Only one year old.

It will be a long, long time before distributions can compile for x86-64_v3. If Intel wanted to get any credit for their fancy-pants instruction set extensions, they shouldn't have used them for market segmentation.

[sophisticles]

I would not do any serious AV1 encoding on a cpu, just testing.

Wait for hardware encoders to be included on video cards.

[yump]

I would not do any serious AV1 encoding on a cpu, just testing.

Wait for hardware encoders to be included on video cards.

The range of quality/bitrate efficiency from hardware encoders has historically ranged from terrible to, "pretty impressive, for a realtime encode". Do you have any reason to expect the AV1 encoders to land more toward the good end of the spectrum or even beat CPUs for offline encoding?

[sophisticles]

The range of quality/bitrate efficiency from hardware encoders has historically ranged from terrible to, "pretty impressive, for a realtime encode". Do you have any reason to expect the AV1 encoders to land more toward the good end of the spectrum or even beat CPUs for offline encoding?

Yes, because the quality of hardware encoders has improved at a faster rate than software encoders as the demand for faster and faster solutions with better power consumption has increased. Intel's QSV encoder started out pretty good and has improved drastically ever since. I have used it extensively with my Ice Lake laptop and it matches the open source software encoders easily.

X264, and z265, started out horrible,, both in quality and speed and slowly improved from there.

Now, no one wants to spend huge bucks building a power hungry pc to encode AV1 in real time, they want speed and efficiency.

I expect the first publicly available AV1 encoders to be able to match x265 and SVT-HEVC in quality and only improve from there.

[mdedetrich]

Using encoding like AV1, it can reduce the time it takes to download video.

This is especially true if your network is slow.

Thats an extension of the same problem...

The reason this effects your network is also the same reason behind it taking up more space on servers (i.e. its bigger). They are both related.

@cl333r Is right, Google uses AV1 is because the video files for the same perceptive quality takes up less room on the servers which also reduces the network bandwidth requirements (for the same reason). And yes this is being offloaded to users who are paying for it by hogging their CPU since hardware acceleration for AV1 is still kinda non existent in consumer hardware.

I don't really blame google though, the amount of capital required to run Youtube is ginormous considering its a free service, even taking into account the money they are making off of it via advertising. Video streaming/hosting is like airlines, its so demanding in this regard that most companies in this business are lucky to break even.

[MadeUpName]

I would not do any serious AV1 encoding on a cpu, just testing.

Wait for hardware encoders to be included on video cards.

I have to agree. All of the vendors will have their next gen cards out this year with AV1 hardware encoding. While I agree that software encoding has traditionally been better that hardware encoding as far as quality is concerned, AV1s software encoding has left me extremely unimpressed so I am hoping hardware encoding wil be an improvement. I suspect though that for people who really care about image quality AV1 won't be a go to codec, it will be relegated to Zoom and Teams type applications. Yes all the big streamers are moving to AV1 but all of their re-encodes are worse than the h.265 they are replacing. Netflix in particular ticks me off as they keep jacking up the price of their top tear claiming they are providing better picture etc while reducing the actual quality of their image because of excessive compression while re-encoding to AV1.

[Orphis]

Google uses AV1 is because the video files for the same perceptive quality takes up less room on the servers which also reduces the network bandwidth requirements

No, you don't only keep an AV1 copy. You have all the other versions as well stored. AV1 increase the storage requirements and the processing time needed to encode videos. So each new codec is detrimental to storage space, but that's usually not a big factor.

The size decrease for the same quality is great though since it means more users get access to videos on metered or poor quality connections.

[brucethemoose]

No, you don't only keep an AV1 copy. You have all the other versions as well stored. AV1 increase the storage requirements and the processing time needed to encode videos. So each new codec is detrimental to storage space, but that's usually not a big factor.

The size decrease for the same quality is great though since it means more users get access to videos on metered or poor quality connections.

From what I've seen, YouTube encodes AV1 close to the VP9 bitrate, so you just get more quality out of the same stream. And they only do it with really popular videos, and even then only sporadically.

Not that I have *any* issue with that. More quality from YT is great.