This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts: ...

Motivation While trying to try out the latest features for the libaom AV1 encoder, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a hold of the latest binary. As of writing of this blog, I haven’t come across any source on the web that publishes a binary of libaom AV1 encoder. Often while trying to get a hold of the latest changes in libaom, you have to build the source yourself which takes time. Therefore, I took it upon myself to publish a weekly build of FFmpeg with the latest available libaom source @ https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom. ...

AVIF in Spectrum lib While browsing for AV1/AVIF updates, I noticed this commit to Facebook’s open source Spectrum library that adds support for AVIF format. https://github.com/facebookincubator/spectrum/commit/89b87bee831d3c7aabd0ad327fb118ce699df55d Spectrum is an image transcoding library for iOS and Android that is meant to be integrated into apps for image operations. Hopefully this means that we’ll see apps supporting AVIF format soon! FFmpeg 4.2 release FFmpeg 4.2 codenamed “Ada” was released on August 5th, 2019. It brought with it support for AV1 decoding through libdav1d decoder. This should make it possible for applications which integrate FFmpeg to build in support for decoding AV1 files. For the full release notes visit the below link. ...

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 ...

This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts: ...

It’s been a pretty busy for me professionally which is why this month’s AV1 ecosystem update is coming in pretty late. It’s been one of the most exciting months for AV1 development and a lot to catch up on! With so much news this month, it is starting to feel like we’re at the cusp of something big! (which we hope AV1 will be ) Youtube pauses AV1 rollout Currently, YouTube is the biggest streaming platform delivering AV1 video and is responsible for the majority of AV1 video consumption on the internet. But a recent message posted to AV1 subreddit announced that YouTube was pausing the rollout of AV1. The reason was not shared but AV1 seems to be performing well at YouTube with the intent to expand its use soon. Here’s the full message: ...

This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts: ...

May was another amazing month for the AV1 codec! We saw great progress in the SVT-AV1 encoder, Android update news and some surprising news out of China! SVT-AV1 is making strides! Let’s start with SVT-AV1 encoder, the current encoder of choice for Netflix, being developed by the folks at Intel. In May, version 0.5.0 was released with the following features: 8 bit / 10 bit 4:2:0 up to 4K60p resolutions Presets 0-8 New API, FFmpeg, GStreamer plugins Rate control support (VBR, CVBR) Block sizes from 4x4 to 128x128 Non-square blocks Tiles Deblocking / CDEF / Restoration filters Film Grain Warped motion estimation Intra block copy Trellis quantized coefficient optimization Support for 4 and 5 layers prediction structures Chroma search in MD Multi-reference picture support Other notable updates May also saw the most number of commits to the SVT-AV1 Github repo as shown by the graph below. There were also 40 PRs merged in the month of May. ...

Bitstream spec https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/ Encoder Implementations SVT-AV1 Homepage https://01.org/svt Source repo https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 User-Guide https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/blob/master/Docs/svt-av1_encoder_user_guide.md Roadmap Trello page Microsoft Azure whitepaper https://01.org/sites/default/files/documentation/svt_azure_wp.pdf Amazon Web Services (AWS) Whitepaper http://01.org/sites/default/files/documentation/svt_aws_wp.pdf Mailing List http://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/svt-av1 aomenc Homepage and Source repo https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/ rav1e Homepage, Source repo https://github.com/xiph/rav1e Decoder Implementations dav1d Homepage, Source repo https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d Presentations Mozilla @ NAB 2019 [April 2019 by Nathan Egge] AOM - AV1How does it work? [July 2017 by Pascal Massimino] Videos Video @Scale 2018 - Yue Chen, Google Yue Chen, Senior AV1 Engineer at Google, gives a technical overview of the AV1 video codec. ...

It’s been an exciting time following the progress of the royalty free video codec AV1 over the past year and April might just be the most exciting active month in the amount of news we got about AV1! It’s not every day that media industry giants such as Netflix, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, ARM, Facebook, Nvidia, Intel, Cisco and many others agree on the same technology stack! Samsung joins the party The month started with Samsung announcing they were joining the Alliance of Open Media Board at the highest level. ...