If May and June were F1 race cars in terms of speed of AV1 development, then July would probably be a Honda Civic. After numerous exciting announcements in the previous month, July felt like everyone’s on vacation, which is probably true because summer months tend to be slow as the school’s out. So, this update will be a short one as I’m out on vacation as well :)

Mile High Video 2019

Nathan Egge of Mozilla and Brion Vibber of Wikimedia presented a session recapping AV1’s progress in the last year. Here’s a recap of the most important parts of the presentation

  • Live encode and playback demo in all major browsers (even Safari!) using the dav1d decoder. The Safari demo was done using a WebAssembly shim called ogv.js. ogv.js includes a build of the dav1d AV1 decoder which works well enough in Safari at low resolutions currently. Once the WebAssembly threading and SIMD support matures, the higher resolutions should also become playable in browsers without native AV1 support
  • 4K decoding on an iPad Pro showing that it’s possible to decode a 4K AV1 file even in software!
  • 1 in 8 videos played in Firefox in July 2019 were AV1!

For the details of other demos shown, I’ve embedded the presentation below.

Switch Media “Working with the AV1 codec” presentation

Kevin Staunton-Lambert of Switch Media posted his presentation about working with AV1. It has some useful info on how to use AV1 as well as why AV1 achieves better compression. The slides are embedded below.

Xilinx acquires NGCodec

In last month’s ecosystem update, I talked about NGCodec impressive presentation about real time AV1 encoding using their upcoming FPGA encoder. Well, this month the folks over at Xilinx seem to have been impressed by the work NGCodec team has done with their existing solutions (read: Twitch’s real time VP9 deployment) and announced they are acquiring NGCodec. The announcement can be found below.

Buffer Be Gone! Xilinx Acquires NGCodec to Deliver High-Quality, Efficient Cloud Video Encoding

rav1e and SVT-AV1 updates

July continued the development progress on the SVT-AV1 and rav1e encoders. While there were no major releases, I counted

Looking at the commit activity, July was a pretty slow month for SVT-AV1 development compared to June. rav1e commit activity July 2019 SVT-AV1 commit activity July 2019

libvips now supports compressing images in AVIF format

libvips, a fast image processing library with low memory needs will soon add support for AVIF compression through libheif support. See the Github discussion below.

Previous ecosystem updates

AV1 resources

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