alt Hacker NewsWow. 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?
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> 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?
Hopefully AV2.
I'm not too surprised. It's similar to the metric that "XX% of Internet is on IPv6" -- it's almost entirely driven by mobile devices, specifically phones. As soon as both mainstream Android and iPhones support it, the adoption of AV1 should be very 'easy'.
(And yes, even for something like Netflix lots of people consume it with phones.)
how does that mean "~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware encoding"? I'm guessing you meant hardware decoding???
Not trolling, but I'd bet something that's augmented with generative AI. Not to the level of describing scenes with words, but context-aware interpolation.
>So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support
That'd be h264 (associated patents expired in most of the world), vp9 and av1.
h265 aka HEVC is less common due to dodgy, abusive licensing. Some vendors even disable it with drivers despite hardware support because it is nothing but legal trouble.
> 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.