Comment by AceJohnny2
9 years ago
The post doesn't mention hardware or silicon implementations. That's a key requirement for modern market adoption: if a mobile device can't hardware-decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker.
I know Google provided a free hardware decode block for VP8, and I assume also for VP9 (since there appears to have been some, though not universal, hardware acceleration for that according the the Wikipedia article). I'm hoping they'll soon (or already) have the same for VP1.
I see Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Allegro, AMD, and a bunch of other silicon vendors are also members of the Alliance for Open Media, so I expect to see hardware acceleration within the next 2-3 years. I'll be impressed if it's earlier.
Edit: maybe hardware acceleration earlier. If the standard was released recently with the collaboration of the silicon industry, it's likely the current in-design/early-production silicon already has an implementation of the important parts of the codec, so we can expect consumer products with at least partial acceleration within 6 months.
Yes, Google is developing a free AV1 HW decoder, as discussed near the end of this (interesting!) deck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16699000)
There is some interesting Q&A at the end of Pascal's talk. My schoolboy French is not fast enough to do a proper translation unfortunately. He was asked about parallel (software) decoding and I think the gist was he thought it would be a bit difficult because of the dependencies between region images.
https://parisvideotech.com/pvt-4-les-formats-et-codecs-du-fu...
It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that a brand new just released video codec does not yet have hardware decode support.
Came here to comment this. Seriously, HN, relax. This is like the introductory blogpost, how is there supposed to be a meatspace hardware implementation yet?
They're just balancing out the "AV1 is here and Netflix is dropping H.265 tomorrow" posts.
2 replies →
> if a mobile device can't hardware-decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker.
A mobile device needs to be able to hardware-encode it as well - countless hours of 4k/60 video are taken on phones.
I'm not sure that you need mobile hardware encoding to drive initial adoption. As long as streaming services and the like can start using it to save bandwidth, you have a clear win for a big segment of the market. Older codecs can serve just fine for mobile encoding until the hardware catches up. But if most existing phones can't decode it efficiently, it's going to be pretty stuck until that situation changes.
I'd argue that it's more important to get encoders working, since re-encoding lossy->lossy is always a bad idea.
8 replies →
Hardware acceleration for encoding is also pretty important. Entry-level game streamers need it (Twitch recently proved that this isn't a negligible market[1]). Playing back AV1 on a phone implies receiving it - which means that users need to store their videos to AV1 directly.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/04/07/ninjas-ne...
Adoption is forced by pirated stuff. If scene groups start to use it, people will want to play it. And those groups don't care if you can play whole movies on your phone. Because thats not what a phone is mainly for.
The scene cares a lot about codec support.
You can tell that they do if you read the scene standards.
They care much much more about this than most people do. Even a lot of people that work with video professionally don’t care as much about codecs and codec support as these guys do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Video_standar...
So no, I don’t believe that “real” scene groups would start using a new codec unless it was widely supported. The scene standards, then, would not include such codecs. Failure to follow scene standards will have your releases nuked in the scene.
As for the torrent sites, if someone puts up videos using codecs that cause the videos to stutter or plain fail to play then the torrent users will learn to associate whoever encoded those videos with videos that don’t work and they will avoid torrents with that person or group name in them.
I remember when MP4 was the standard yet the scene used AVI and MKV. I get the impression that they care more about their own idiosyncratic notions of technical superiority than compatibility (hey, kinda like HN).
12 replies →
That's not really true.
The data from YouTube or Netflix dwarfs what you'd get from a torrent distributor of a show or whatever.
Some pirate/niche markets may adopt a codec solely for some arbitrary reason, but those reasons (say, maximum compression, good open source tools) are normally orthogonal to what a streaming business usually needs (compression, but also hardware/software compatibility for all sorts of form factors, and commercial unencumberment).
I bet you’re right. AFAIK pretty much all but the cheapest TVs sold now (or at least 4K TVs) support HEVC specifically to support builtin apps for Netflix and similar. Unfortunately YouTube uses the competing VP9, which my 2 year old Vizio 4K TV does not support, but apparently devices like the Chromecast Ultra and 4K Apple TV support it as well.
Movie and music piracy has taken a prodigal nosedive to the point that I don't think this would be true at all anyway. In addition streaming video and short form content dwarfs film and TV consumption, making high mobile efficiency paramount.
Prodigal? Proverbial?
1 reply →