The Tale of Two next-gen SOCs - Snapdragon 865 and MediaTek Dimensity 1000

Last month, we saw the release of SOCs expected to power next-gen flagship smartphones. Since the AV1 standard as formalized, the community has been waiting to see when SOC manufacturers add hardware support for AV1 decoding. It looks like we'll be waiting a lot longer for such a chip from Qualcomm. In what might come as a shock, MediaTek announced the first SOC to feature such support with their new Dimensity 1000 chip. Qualcomm meanwhile announced the Snapdragon 865 SOC which focused on 5G support and camera improvements this year.

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rav1e 0.1 released

Rav1e got its first official release, published during the Video Dev Days 2019 in Tokyo. Here are the included features:

  • Intra and inter frames
  • 64x64 superblocks
  • 4x4 to 64x64 RDO-selected square and 2:1/1:2 rectangular blocks
  • DC, H, V, Paeth, smooth, and a subset of directional prediction modes
  • DCT, (FLIP-)ADST and identity transforms (up to 64x64, 16x16 and 32x32 respectively)
  • 8-, 10- and 12-bit depth color
  • 4:2:0 (full support), 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 (limited) chroma sampling
  • 11 speed settings (0-10)
  • Near real-time encoding at high speed levels
  • Rate control (single-pass and two-pass)
  • Temporal RDO
  • Scene cut detection
  • CLI tool and C API

Downloads @ https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/releases/tag/0.1.0

In more rav1e progress, u/dwbuiten on reddit noticed that rav1e got included in ffmpeg with the following commit. Hopefully, this means that in an upcoming ffmpeg release, we’ll have a common tool to encode with any of the open AV1 encoders.

SVT-AV1 v0.7.5 released

Not to be left behind, SVT-AV1 also got a major release last month. Here are the features included:

Encoder

  • RDOQ for 10-bit
  • Inter Intra Class pruning at MD-Staging
  • Global Motion Vector support for 8-bit and 10-bit
  • Interpolation Filter Search support for 10-bit
  • Palette Prediction support
  • 2-pass encoding support
  • ATB 10-bit support at the encode pass
  • Simplified MD Staging [only 3 stages]
  • Inter-Inter and Inter-Intra Compound for 10-bit
  • Intra Path for 10-bit
  • Filter Intra Prediction
  • New-Near and Near-New support
  • OBMC Support for 8-bit and 10-bit
  • RDOQ Chroma
  • ATB Support for Inter Blocks
  • Temporal Filtering for 10-bit
  • Eight-pel support in predictive ME
  • MCTS Tiles support
  • Added AVX512 Optimizations
  • Added AVX2 Optimizations

Decoder

  • SuperRes support
  • Reference Frame Scaling support
  • 12-bit support
  • Annex B support

Downloads @ https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/releases/tag/v0.7.5

Handbrake 1.3.0 released with AV1 decoding support

Handbrake is one of the most popular encoding tools. Users have been waiting for Handbrake to add support for AV1 encoders for a while. While we didn't get that support in 1.3.0 release, it’s a start. Full changelog is available @ https://handbrake.fr/news.php?article=43

 

AV1 on the YouTube & Facebook

YouTube has long been leading the charge for streaming AV1 on the web. Until now, because of the speed of encoding AV1, the resolution was limited to 720p. However, u/toggleton on reddit noticed that YouTube was now encoding some 4K videos in AV1.

In addition to YouTube, Facebook was also spotted streaming in AV1 by u/Ktr4ks on reddit.

Facebook streaming AV1

Previous ecosystem updates

AV1 resources

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