AV1

A weekend project that turned into discovering how Netflix is quietly revolutionizing streaming efficiency with AV1.

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...