Comment by pwython
3 hours ago
Ten years later, 2026 magic: AV1
https://engineering.fb.com/2026/06/22/video-engineering/adop...
And soon AV2
3 hours ago
Ten years later, 2026 magic: AV1
https://engineering.fb.com/2026/06/22/video-engineering/adop...
And soon AV2
That's all well and good, but let me know when I can buy a used $50 NUC or pi or such that has hw decoding of the same for my TV front ends.
Intel has supported native hardware decoder for AV1 since Tiger Lake. That’s quite old. You could buy a used NUC with Tiger Lake. Even when new a NUC with 1115G4 or 1135G7 isn’t expensive. I found one with damaged WiFi for $20. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366767313411 You can buy it now.
I went to the link to buy a computer (a NUC11TNKi3) with this capability for $20, but all it would let me do is place a bid on it; I cannot buy it now.
It looks like they normally sell for around $200: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=NUC11TNKi3&LH_Sold=1
Do you really care if your NUC uses an extra 2 watts to do software decoding?
And maybe ten more and enough hardware will support it that it will be mainstream.
AV1? It's mainstream already. Lots of hardware supports it and you don't need hardware support for many other cases.
Mainstream? The most popular hardware streaming device (Nvidia shield) does not even support it, so I wouldnt call it mainstream.
11 replies →
Sorry, but YouTube began thermal throttling on a Firestick the moment they started forcing AV1 regardless of the presence of on-device hardware support.
4 replies →
AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size, individually or when considering both. I prefer it to h264 (or vp9 or even h265) at this point, and there isn't a particular need for hardware decode to benefit from it. On Youtube (probably the biggest and most accessible source of av1 video), when comparing size and quality on different codecs (h264/vp9/av1), av1 is either gonna have much smaller size while keeping some level of quality, or have better quality at similar size, or even have both be better.
Firesticks are quite popular. I'd like to see what percentage in the wild actually does decode AV1 in hardware, and without stuttering or buffering problems. Even my newer devices sometimes choke on h265.
The first Apple chips with AV1 support only came out in 2023. So the majority of Apple hardware out there doesn't support it. It will be a long time till support is at >95%.
2018 AV1 demo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127
We need one final video codec.
Otherwise we will have this:
https://xkcd.com/927/
At any point in time there's only a couple video codecs you should be using. When we can repeatedly shave off 30% of video bandwidth, there's no reason to stop making one or two new ones every decade.
Edit: And you can also look at the video codec landscape as having two major standards that put out new versions sometimes. The MPEG/h.26x series and the VPx/AVx series. It's not quite that simple but it's close.
There is no need to have a final one. It's no problem to keep supporting older codecs and add new ones in new products, as long as there's a "common ground" of widely supported codecs.
I feel as though AI is going to blow these all out of the water soon.
And then we'll get AI-designed hardware codecs for them.
Or the AI will be the codec - intelligence is compression.
Yes, "neural" or "learned" video codecs are considered the future. They already have competitive compression ratios, but last thing I heard was that they are still much slower than conventional codecs.