These are the words used by the user holdagold on reddit to describe their experience with the new Apple Silicon M1 Macbook Air. Rarely does a product leave people effusing to the extent Apple Silicon M1 has done this week.

Earlier this year, when Spotify announced that “The Joe Rogan Experience” would stream exclusively on Spotify, it sent shockwaves throughout the podcast ecosystem. This deal – reportedly worth over $100 million – is one of the most lucrative podcast deals. The presence of this deal, let alone the magnitude, is rare for the podcast ecosystem, which is built on open principles i.e. all podcasts are available everywhere. Therefore, the concept of exclusivity does not exist in the vocabulary of podcast listeners nor podcast creators. For Spotify to spend a considerable sum of money on a medium that is not its core business (i.e. music) represents a significant shift in strategy. In this blog, I explore why Spotify is embarking on this journey, and the value Spotify can deliver in this space. ...

January is usually a big month for tech because the Consumer Electronics Shows kicks off every year in Las Vegas. This year was no different as various manufacturers brought their latest products to showcase. Samsung and LG 2020 TVs to support AV1 decoding We have been waiting all of 2019 to see consumer devices that can decode AV1 and CES did not disappoint! Both Samsung and LG announced their upcoming 2020 TVs will be capable of full hardware decode of 8K AV1 videos from sources such as YouTube. Read more about the announcements below. ...

Introduction It’s not often you see so many logos of tech giants on one page backing the same technology. In my experience, every enterprise has developed a case of NIH and come up with their standards. No surprise then that there’s an XKCD describing this phenomenon! But when the AV1 1.0.0 spec was finalized in 2018, with the backing of so many giants, the world knew AV1 would be a serious piece of tech. With the spec finalized, the race was on to get AV1 integrated into your favorite software & hardware for encoding, decoding, and viewing media. By the end of 2018, AV1 adoption was moving at a healthy pace and completed significant milestones necessary to mainstream adoption. Some of these were: ...

dav1d 0.5.2 ‘Asiatic Cheetah’ released dav1d ended the year with another performance improvement release. Dubbed the “Asiatic Cheetah” this release brings the following improvements: ARM32 optimizations for loopfilter, ipred_dc|h|v Add section-5 raw OBU demuxer Improve the speed by reducing the L2 cache collisions Fix minor issues, including compilation on some OSes Release notes for dav1d 0.5.2 ‘Asiatic Cheetah’ rav1e v0.2.0: Winter Solstice released Building on the official 0.1.0 release in November, rav1e had a busy December with 3 releases. Overall, rav1e got a lot faster which is only good news for AV1 encoding! Here are the improvements included in the 0.2.0 release. ...

I recently discovered the importance of being in control of the notifications on your smartphone. When my recent LinkedIn post went viral, I received many comments and connection requests, which led to a constant buzzing of notifications from the LinkedIn app on my phone. This is never fun when you’re trying to concentrate 😊 Pre-Requisites Install the LinkedIn Android app . A fairly recent version of Android. This guide is based on Android 9 behavior. Steps to customize the app notifications To get started, locate the LinkedIn app in your app drawer or on the home screen. ...

What is LinkedIn? I have never really discovered the value of LinkedIn until about a year ago when I started using it seriously to search for a new job opportunity. I have always viewed it as a Facebook clone with a horrible and inconsistent UI. But I was surprised to discover that LinkedIn had updated their UI with a copy-paste job from Facebook. Using LinkedIn is now a much more pleasant experience! ...

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. ...

Let’s start this month’s roundup with a faster decoder! dav1d 0.5.0 & 0.5.1 release In October, dav1d saw two new releases with some fantastic speed improvements. Here is a summary: Large improvements in speed on SSSE3 CPU (up to 40% speedup) Speed improvements on AVX-2 (for 4-7%) Speed improvements on ARM64 (up to 10%) and ARM32. 0.5.1 is a minor release which brings improvements in speed for SSE2 CPUs (up to 50% speedup), and ARMv7 CPUs (up to 41% speedup). Detailed release notes can be found at: ...

Let’s start this month’s roundup with the release of two of our favorite encoders - rav1e and SVT-AV1! rav1e rav1e finally has a new weekly pre-release with the following updates: Improvements More API documentation Better error reporting Nicer error messages in the cli application Explicit validation of the encoder configuration The input Frame type can be expressed Added cargo-fuzz support and documented its usage Better rate-control support Two-pass rate-control support Additional speedups over all the speed levels on x86_64 Changes ...