AV1: A Modern, Open Codec

I understand that sometimes the HN titles get edited to be less descriptive and more generic in order to match the actual article title.

What’s the logic with changing the title here from the actual article title it was originally submitted with “AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming” to the generic and not at all representative title it currently has “AV1: a modern open codec”? That is neither the article title nor representative of the article content.

Wow. To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding. The article lists a bunch of examples of devices that have gained it in the past few years. I had no idea it was getting that popular -- fantastic news!

So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support, I wonder what will be the next one?

Amazing. Proprietary video codecs need to not be the default and this is huge validation for AV1 as a production-ready codec.

I had forgotten about the film-grain extraction, which is a clever approach to a huge problem for compression.

But... did I miss it, or was there no mention of any tool to specify grain parameters up front? If you're shooting "clean" digital footage and you decide in post that you want to add grain, how do you convey the grain parameters to the encoder?

It would degrade your work and defeat some of the purpose of this clever scheme if you had to add fake grain to your original footage, feed the grainy footage to the encoder to have it analyzed for its characteristics and stripped out (inevitably degrading real image details at least a bit), and then have the grain re-added on delivery.

So you need a way to specify grain characteristics to the encoder directly, so clean footage can be delivered without degradation and grain applied to it upon rendering at the client.

AV1 is not new anymore and I think most of the modern devices are supporting them natively. Some devices like Apple even have a dedicated AV1 HW-accelerator. Netflix has pushing AV1 for a while now so I thought that the adoption rate should be like 50%, but it seems like AV1 requires better hardware and newer software which a lot of people don't have.

There's an HDR war brewing on TikTok and other social apps. A fraction of posts that use HDR are just massively brighter than the rest; the whole video shines like a flashlight. The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse.

I'm surprised AV1 usage is only at 30%. Is AV1 so demanding that Netflix clients without AV1 hardware acceleration capabilities would be overwhelmed by it?

Netflix has been the worst performing and lowest quality video stream of any of the streaming services. Fuzzy video, lots of visual noise and artifacts. Just plan bad and this is on the 4k plan on 1GB fiber on a 4k Apple TV. I can literally tell when someone is watching Netflix without knowing because it looks like shit.

This is really cool. Props to the team that created AV1. Very impressive

On a related note, why are release groups not putting out AV1 WEB-DLs? Most 4K stuff is h265 now but if AV1 is supplied without re-encoding surely that would be better?

>AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC

Sounds like they set HEVC to higher quality then? Otherwise how could it be the same as AVC?

For a second there I wasn't looking very close and I thought it said that 30% of Netflix was running on .AVI files

Qualcomm seems to be lagging behind and doesn't have AV1 decoder except in high end SoCs.

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Is it me or this post has LLM vibes?

Top post without a single comment and only 29 points. Clearly my mental model of how posts bubble to the top is broken.