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AOMedia To Release AV2 Video Codec At Year's End (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 2 days ago by rezad@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

"Set for a year-end release, AV2 is not only an upgrade to the widely adopted AV1 but also a foundational piece of AOMedia’s future tech stack.

AV2, a generation leap in open video coding and the answer to the world’s growing streaming demands, delivers significantly better compression performance than AV1. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. AV2 marks a milestone on the path to an open, innovative future of media experiences."

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[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 16 hours ago

The main thing I want is small file size for the quality. Netflix, YouTube, and me agree on that.

Most of my stuff is AV1 today even though the two TVs I typically watch it on do not support it. Most of the time, what I am watching is high-bitrate H.264 that was transcoded from the low-bitrate AV1.

I will probably move to AV2 shortly after it is available. At least, I will be an early adopter. The smaller the files the better. And, in the future when quality has gone up everywhere, my originals will play native and look great.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

All these naysaysers in the comments here... It's obvious you have to keep the development pipeline moving. Just because we have one free codec at the stage of hardware support now does not mean the world can stop. There are always multiple codecs out there at various stages of adoption, that's just normal.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 16 hours ago

It will be great if we have AV2 before H.267

[–] Hazzard@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

Very cool! I've only just recently gotten to experience the joys of AV1 for my own game recordings (Linux is way ahead of Windows here), and dang is it nice. 10 minute flashback recordings of 4K HDR@60 for only 2.5GB, and the results look fantastic. Can just drag and drop it over to YouTube as well, it's fully supported over there.

Glad to see things moving, I'll be eager to check this out in a few years once it has wider support!

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 53 points 2 days ago (2 children)

We only just got hardware support for AV1 and they are already coming out with a new codec?

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 29 points 2 days ago

This is always the case, can't stop development or the delays will get longer

[–] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

Are you saying you want people to stop researching better, more efficient ways to encode audio and video?

[–] hyacin@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

sigh

I literally just bought a 3050 for my NAS for AV1 support.

/wrists

[–] rezad@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

you didn't do the wrong thing.

what many people don't notice is that support for a codec in gpu(in hardware) is two part. one is decoding and one is encoding.

for quality video nobody does hardware encoding (at least not on consumer systems linux this 3050 nvidia)

for most users the important this is hardware support for decoding so that they can watch their 4k movie with no issue.

so you are in the clear.

you can watch av1 right now and when av2 becomes popular enough to be used in at least 4 years from now.

[–] RedSnt@feddit.dk 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I can't wait to possibly buy a card a decade from now with AV2 hardware decoding. Ain't happening until after 2035 that's for sure.
If we're lucky some firmware upgrade or driver can make AV1 hardware decoding capable cards able to do AV2 as well, but I seriously doubt it - GPU manufacturers want to sell new cards all the time after all.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 2 points 16 hours ago

We will probably have decoding in 5 years. Encoding may take longer.

[–] rezad@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

maybe, maybe not.

when h264 was introduced (Aug 2004), even intel had HW encoding for it with sandybridge in 2011. nvidia had at 2012

so less than 7 years.

av1 was first introduced 7 years ago and for at least two years android TVs require HW decoding for it.

And AMD rdna2 had the same 4 years ago.

so from introduction to hardware decoding it took 3 years.

I have no idea why 10 years is thrown around.

and av1 had to compete with h264 and h265 both. ( they had to decide if it was worth implementing it)

[–] RedSnt@feddit.dk 3 points 1 day ago

Oh yeah, I'm sure they'll include the decoding chips sooner, and apologies I should've been more specific and say that it's me that is not planning on buying a new GPU with AV2 HW decoding until a decade from now.

[–] Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Another codec, that will take a decade to get widespread adoption and hardware compatability. /sigh

[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

And which will be so resource intensive to encode with compared to existing standards that it'll probably take 14 years before home media collectors (or yar har types) are able and willing to use it over HEVC and AV1. :\

As an example AV1 encodes to this day are extremely rare in the p2p scene. Most groups still work with h264 or h265 even those focusing specifically on reducing sizes while maintaining quality. By contrast HEVC had significant uptake within 3-4 years of its release in the p2p scene (we're on year 7 for AV1).

These greedy, race to the bottom device-makers are still fighting AV1. With people keeping devices longer and not upgrading as much as well as tons of people relying on under-powered smart-TVs for watching (forcing streaming services to maintain older codecs like h264/h265 to keep those customers) means it's going to take a depressingly long time to be anything but a web streaming phenomenon I fear.

[–] CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

To be fair, it's also basically impossible to have extremely high quality AV1 video, which is what a lot of P2P groups strive for. A lot of effort has gone into trying to do so and results weren't good enough compared to x264, so it's been ignored. AV1 is great at compression efficiency, but it can't make fully transparent encodes (i.e., indistinguishable from the source). It might be different with AV2, though again even if it's possible it may be ignored because of compatibility instead; groups still use DTS-HD MA over the objectively superior FLAC codec for surround sound because of hardware compatibility to this day. (1.0/2.0 channels they use FLAC because players support that usually)

As for HEVC/x265, it too is not as good as x264 at very high quality encoding, so it's also ignored when possible. Basically the breakdown is that 4k encoding uses x265 in order to store HDR and because the big block efficiency of x265 is good enough to compress further than the source material. x264 wouldn't be used for 4k encoding even if it could store HDR because its compression efficiency is so bad at higher resolutions that to have any sort of quality encode it would end up bigger than the source material. Many people don't even bother with 4k x265 encodes and just collect the full disc/remuxes instead, because they dislike x265's encoder quality and don't deem the size efficiency worth its picture quality impact (pretty picky people here, and I'm not really in that camp).

For 1080p, x265 is only used when you want to have HDR in a 1080p package, because again x265's picture quality can't match x264, but most people deem HDR a bigger advantage. x264 is still the tool of choice for non-HDR 1080p encodes, and that's not a culture thing, that's just a quality thing. When you get down into public P2P or random encoding groups it's anything goes, and x265 1080p encodes get a lot more common because x265 efficiency is pretty great compared to x264, but the very top-end quality just can't match x264 in the hands of an experienced encoder, so those encoding groups only use x265 when they have to.

Edit: All that to say, we can't entirely blame old-head culture or hardware compatibility for the unpopularity of newer formats. I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for. WEB-DL content favors HEVC and AV1 because it's very efficient and displays a "good enough" quality picture for their viewers. Physical Blu-Rays don't have to worry about HDD space or bandwidth and just pump the bitrate insane on HEVC so that the picture quality looks great. For the record, VVC/x266 is already on the shortlist for being junk for the usecases described above (x266 is too new to fully judge), so I wouldn't hold my breath for AV2 either. If you're okay with non-transparency, I'd just stick with HEVC WEB-DLs or try to find good encoding groups that target a more opinionated quality:size ratio (some do actually use AV1!). Rules of thumb for WEB-DL quality are here, though it will always vary on a title-by-title basis.

[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for.

Well yeah given who makes it but it's what I care about. I couldn't care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn't designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.

Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn't likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.

Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it's hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn't benefit the user in any way really.

[–] CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Yep, fully agree. At least BluRays still exist for now. Building a beefy NAS and collecting full BluRay disks allows us to brute force the picture quality through sheer bitrate at least. There are a number of other problems to think about as well before we even get to the encoder stage, such as many (most?) 4k movies/TV shows being mastered in 2k (aka 1080p) and then upscaled to 4k. Not to mention a lot of 2k BluRays are upscaled from 720p! It just goes on and on. As a whole, we're barely using the capabilities of true 4k in our current day. Most of this UHD/4k "quality" craze is being driven by HDR, which also has its own share of design/cultural problems. The more you dig into all this stuff the worse it gets. 4k is billed as "the last resolution we'll ever need", which IMO is probably true, but they don't tell you that the 4k discs they're selling you aren't really 4k.

[–] xyguy@startrek.website 11 points 1 day ago

Oh yeah if AV1 is so great how come there isnt an AV tw...oh wait....

[–] linkerbaan@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

AV1 was mid. Extremely slow encoding and minor performance gains over H265. And no good encoders on release.

H266 was miles ahead but that is propriatary like 265. So win some lose some.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Compression and efficiency is often a trade-off. H266 is also much slower than AV1, under same conditions. Hopefully there will come more AV1 hw encoders to speed things up.. but at least the AV1 decoders are already relatively common.

Also, the gap between h265 and AV1 is higher than between AV1 and h266. So I'd argue it's the other way around. AV1 is reported to be capable of ~30-50% bitrate savings over h.265 at the cost of speed. H266 differences with AV1 are minor, it's reported to get a similar range, but more balanced towards the 50% side and at the cost of even lower speed. I'd say once AV1 encoding hardware is more common and the higher presets for AV1 become viable it'd be a good balance for most cases.

The thing is that h26x has a consortium of corporations behind with connections and an interest to ensure they can cash in on their investment, so they get a lot of traction to get hw out.

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AV1 only has gains at very low quality settings. For high quality, h265 is much better. At least with the codecs available in ffmpeg, from my tests.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Note that high-quality + low-bitrate AV1 setup often requires using parameters that rise the time and processing power beyond what's typically sensible in an average setup without hw encoder. And compared with h265 this would be even higher since not only is h265 less complex and faster to begin with, but it also is often hw accelerated.

Here there's a 2020 paper comparing various encoders for high quality on fullHD: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340351958_MSU_Video_Codec_Comparison_2019_part_IV_High-Quality_Encoding_aom_rav1e_SVT-AV1_SVT-HEVC_SVT-VP9_x264_x265_ENTERPRISE_VERSION

"First place in the quality competition goes to aom [AOMedia's AV1 encoder], second place goes to SVT-AV1, and third place to x265"

And av1 codecs are younger, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have improved over the h265 ones since the article.

Here's the settings they used in aom, for reference:

aomenc.exe --width=%WIDTH% --height=%HEIGHT% 
    --fps=%FPS_NUM%/%FPS_DENOM% --bit-depth=8 --end-usage=vbr 
    --cpu-used=0 --target-bitrate=%BITRATE_KBPS% --ivf --threads=32 
    --tune=ssim -o %TARGET_FILE% %SOURCE_FILE%
[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago

I can try it again, but what I did was compare h265 to SVT-AV1 in ffmpeg, using a couple different clips of different styles (including a video from my phone and some ripped blu-ray movies). I used “constant quality / variable bitrate settings, and ran each file with a variety of settings for both encoders. I judged the videos with a quality comparison tool ffmpeg has, and I also took subjective notes when I could tell the difference.

I found AV1 did better at very low quality (when it was firmly into the region where it was visibly different, AV1 did have better quality per bitrate).

But when trying to produce high-quality clips, AV1 was never able to produce a clip that matched the quality score of h265, even when the bitrate of the AV1 file was higher.

[–] Zer0_F0x@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

Looking ahead, 53% of AOMedia members surveyed plan to adopt AV2 within 12 months upon its finalization later this year, with 88% expecting to implement it within the next two years.

From AOMedia website. So the plan is for it to have AV1 levels of adoption by 2028.

[–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

God damn it, not again

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So... a lot more people now have :

  • 4G/5G on the go and proper broadband at home and office and even in unique location (sadly via MuskSat for now...) other ways to get data
  • very capable devices in mobile phones, (mostly Android) clients e.g. video projector or dongles, of course computers
  • human eyes... that can't really appreciate 4K on average

... so obviously we should NOT stop looking for more efficient ways and new usages but I'm also betting that we are basically reaching diminishing return already. I don't think a lot of people care anymore about much high screen resolution or frequency for typical video streaming. Because that's the most popular usage I imagine everything else, e.g XR, becomes relative to it niche and thus has a hard time benefiting as much from the growth in performances we had until now.

TL;DR: OK cool but aren't we already flattening the curve on the most popular need anyway?

[–] MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not for the end user at this point, it's for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks for the clarification, it makes me wonder though, is it bandwidth saving at no user cost? i.e is the compression improved without requiring more compute at the end to decompress?

[–] MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Then it's arguably delegating some of the cost to the final user, large streaming companies spending a bit less on IXP contracts while viewers have to have newer hardware that might need a bit more energy too to run.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

On the upside, the end user needs to use up less data for the same content. This is particularly interesting under 4G/5G and restrictive data plans, or when accessing places / servers with weak connection. It helps avoid having to wait for the "buffering" of the video content mid-playback.

But yes, I agree each iteration has diminishing returns, with a higher bump in requirements. I feel that's a pattern we see often.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This! Also there's AI upscaling, if good enough it could (in theory) make a 1080p video show with a 4k quality only very few lucky and healthy young people would be able to tell apart. In the meantime, my eyesight progressively gets worse with age.

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago

It would be nice if they could finish AV1 first…