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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....

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)....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....