Comment by 0manrho
17 hours ago
> To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding
Where did it say that?
> AV1 powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing
Is admittedly a bit non-specific, it could be interpreted as 30% of users or 30% of hours-of-video-streamed, which are very different metrics. If 5% of your users are using AV1, but that 5% watches far above the average, you can have a minority userbase with an outsized representation in hours viewed.
I'm not saying that's the case, just giving an example of how it doesn't necessarily translate to 30% of devices using Netflix supporting AV1.
Also, the blog post identifies that there is an effective/efficient software decoder, which allows people without hardware acceleration to still view AV1 media in some cases (the case they defined was Android based phones). So that kinda complicates what "X% of devices support AV1 playback," as it doesn't necessarily mean they have hardware decoding.
That was one of the best decisions of AOMedia.
AV1 was specifically designed to be friendly for a hardware decoder and that decision makes it friendly to software decoding. This happened because AOMedia got hardware manufacturers on the board pretty early on and took their feedback seriously.
VP8/9 took a long time to get decent hardware decoding and part of the reason for that was because the stream was more complex than the AV1 stream.
Hmmm disagree on your chain there. Plenty of easy hardware algorithms are hard for software. For example, in hardware (including FPGAs), bit movement/shuffling is borderline trivial if it's constant, while in software you have to shift and mask and or over and over. In hardware you literally just switch which wire is connected to what on the next stage. Same for weird bit widths. Hardware doesn't care (too much) if you're operating on 9 bit quantities or 33 or 65. Software isn't that granular and often you'll double your storage and waste a bunch.
I think they certainly go hand in hand in that algorithms relatively easier for software vs previously are easier for hardware vs previously and vice versa, but they are good at different things.
I'm not claiming that software will be more efficient. I'm claiming that things that make it easy to go fast in hardware make it easy to go fast in software.
Bit masking/shifting is certainly more expensive in software, but it's also about the cheapest software operation. In most cases it's a single cycle transform. In the best cases, it's something that can be done with some type of SIMD instruction. And in even better cases, it's a repeated operation which can be distributed across the array of GPU vector processors.
What kills both hardware and software performance is data dependency and conditional logic. That's the sort of thing that was limited in the AV1 stream.
All I read about is that it's less hardware friendly than H.264 and HEVC, and they were all complaining about it. AV2 should be better in this regard.
Where did you read that it was designed to make creating an hardware decoder easier?
It was a presentation on AV1 before it was released. I'll see if I can find it but I'm not holding my breath. It's mostly coming from my own recollection.
Ok, I don't think I'll find it. I think I'm mostly just regurgitating what I remember watching at one of the research symposiums. IDK which one it was unfortunately [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@allianceforopenmedia2446/videos
“30% of viewing” I think clearly means either time played or items played. I’ve never worked with a data team that would possibly write that and mean users.
If it was a stat about users they’d say “of users”, “of members”, “of active watchers”, or similar. If they wanted to be ambiguous they’d say “has reached 30% adoption” or something.
I am not in data science so I can not validate your comment, but 30% of viewing I would assume mean users or unique/discreet viewing sessions and not watched minutes. I would appreciate it if Netflix would clarify.
Agreed, but this is the internet, the ultimate domain of pedantry, and they didn't say it explicitly, so I'm not going to put words in their mouth just to have a circular discussion about why I'm claiming they said something they didn't technically say, which is why I asked "Where did it say that" at the very top.
Also, either way, my point was and still stands: it doesn't say 30% of devices have hardware encoding.
In either case, it is still big news.