Part 2: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure

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: ...

August 1, 2019 · 7 min · Kay Singh

AV1 Ecosystem Update: June 2019

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: ...

July 22, 2019 · 6 min · Kay Singh

Part 1: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure

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: ...

June 20, 2019 · 8 min · Kay Singh

AV1 Ecosystem Update: May 2019

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. ...

June 10, 2019 · 4 min · Kay Singh

AV1 Resource Central: Videos, Tools, Presentations, Comparisons, Research Papers, Encoders, Decoders

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. ...

May 14, 2019 · 1 min · Kay Singh

AV1 Ecosystem Update: April 2019

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. ...

May 6, 2019 · 3 min · Kay Singh

It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video!

It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs (no, not that one! We’re never going to be able to decide that one!). GIFs take up a massive amount of space (often multiple megabytes!) and if you’re a web developer, then that’s completely against your ethos! As a web developer, you want to minimize the bits your users need to download so that your website loads fast. That’s why you minify javascript, optimize PNGs, JPEGs and sometimes turn JPEGs to WebPs as well. But then what about the venerable GIF? ...

April 28, 2019 · 9 min · Kay Singh