Alliance for Open Media codecs

[hajj_3]

Hell has frozen over...... Apple has quietly joined AOM as a founding member: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-onli...mpression-av1/

[nevcairiel]

How can you join as a "founding member" this late?

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

How can you join as a "founding member" this late?

I presume founding members pay more money and probably have more voting rights. AOM obviously wanted Apple to join badly as having a single codec for all future smartphones and tablets would be extremely beneficial for everyone.

[GTPVHD]

That's unexpected but welcome news, I'm guessing Apple will have Axx SoCs with fixed function AV1 hardware decoding in the future.

And yes, Hell has frozen over.

[x265_Project]

Originally Posted by GTPVHD

That's unexpected but welcome news, I'm guessing Apple will have Axx SoCs with fixed function AV1 hardware decoding in the future.

That's not a safe assumption. Supporting a standards organization and adopting the standard in your own products and services are two separate decisions. Companies may have many different motivations for the first decision. But it's low risk. They only make the second, much more expensive decision based on a careful cost/benefit analysis for each product line (or in Apple's case, for each platform). It took Apple 4 1/2 years from the time HEVC was standardized until it announced broad support for HEVC (and AV1 is not yet finalized, as far as I know). Apple joining the Alliance for Open Media may actually end up helping HEVC adoption, as AV1 (or the threat of a major platform owner like Apple actually adopting AV1) provides a strong counter-balancing force to convince HEVC patent holders to avoid unreasonable patent license demands. HEVC doesn't need to be free to all implementers to succeed, but it definitely needs to be reasonable, and the work of the Alliance for Open Media is very helpful to the overall cause of enabling advanced encoding standards at reasonable costs. Only time will tell how it all plays out.

[iwod]

There is NetVC, which aims to be a royalty free Video Codec for the Internet, and AV1 is the front runner ( or the only contender ) for it.

Apple may very well only support AV1 in Safari only, much like opus on their platform.

Since Apple already have cross licensing with all the HEVC patents holder, any video patents against AV1 is highly unlikely to be a threat to them. And like @x265_Project have said, this is a move to tell the HEVC patents holder, loosen up or get out of the way.

[GTPVHD]

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articl...an-122476.aspx

[iwod]

Originally Posted by GTPVHD

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articl...an-122476.aspx

Apart from Desktop Web, I dont see any devices that has or would only have AV1 hardware decode support and not HEVC decode support. So the argument for Apple needing AV1 because they are trying to compete with Netflix in the future is moot.

It could be Netflix and Youtube decided against HEVC, which means Apple will need to add AV1 out of necessity. I hardly doubt Apple will budge if it was only Youtube.

While the article said it was being doubtful, I actually think Apple wants its opinion and steering on AV2 a very possible reason.

My guess is that there will be more news leaking out in CES.

[bstrobl]

Originally Posted by x265_Project

It took Apple 4 1/2 years from the time HEVC was standardized until it announced broad support for HEVC (and AV1 is not yet finalized, as far as I know). Apple joining the Alliance for Open Media may actually end up helping HEVC adoption, as AV1 (or the threat of a major platform owner like Apple actually adopting AV1) provides a strong counter-balancing force to convince HEVC patent holders to avoid unreasonable patent license demands. HEVC doesn't need to be free to all implementers to succeed, but it definitely needs to be reasonable, and the work of the Alliance for Open Media is very helpful to the overall cause of enabling advanced encoding standards at reasonable costs. Only time will tell how it all plays out.

Apple already had HEVC in the A8, only to rip it out a short time later. Even the threat of VP9 has only barely provoked licensors into giving slightly better terms.

I think Apple has noticed where the wind is blowing and is also fed up with the other patent groups, having adopted OPUS in High Sierra and iOS 11.

HEVC is done, hope you don't mind creating an xAV1

[Blue_MiSfit]

HEVC is scarcely "done".

It's in production and working extremely well in UHD BluRay, UHD linear TV, and 4K OTT streaming services. It's also enabling great consumer experiences like HDR.

Even if AV1 was done today, there'd be years of runway for broad availability of hardware decoders, and performant, well tuned encoders.

I think we'll all be living with HEVC for several years, at least!

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

HEVC is scarcely "done".

It's in production and working extremely well in UHD BluRay, UHD linear TV, and 4K OTT streaming services. It's also enabling great consumer experiences like HDR.

Even if AV1 was done today, there'd be years of runway for broad availability of hardware decoders, and performant, well tuned encoders.

I think we'll all be living with HEVC for several years, at least!

Hardware decoders will take 12-18 months to make and a small number of months for products to ship with the new chips. YouTube and Netflix will be encoding videos with AV1 within days of it being finalised. A large portion of youtube viewers use a pc which can software decode av1. Sure it will take a while for av1 to become mainstream but we will still be using it quickly. I hope that my new $40 android box that has a quad core 1.5ghz cortex a53 is powerful enough to software decode 1080p AV1.

[mzso]

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

HEVC is scarcely "done".

It's in production and working extremely well in UHD BluRay, UHD linear TV, and 4K OTT streaming services. It's also enabling great consumer experiences like HDR.

Even if AV1 was done today, there'd be years of runway for broad availability of hardware decoders, and performant, well tuned encoders.

I think we'll all be living with HEVC for several years, at least!

We're not even living with HEVC now. It's scarcely used. Websites use VP9 or AVC, home media is encoded in AVC.

I only came in contact with HEVC files via samples and files encoded for filesharing (and it's scarce even here).

[sneaker_ger]

It's often used for 4K. E.g. Netflix, Amazon, Blu-ray, DVB. Also some non-4K broadcasting, e.g. DVB-T2 in Germany is exclusively HEVC (1080p50 max).

And it seems no one is creating VP9. E.g. if you buy a camcorder it will record AVC or HEVC, not VP9. No live VP9 broadcasting. Could end up the same with AV1, i.e. we will consume it via Youtube and Netflix (non-live encoding in big server farms) but in other areas HEVC will be the leader.

We'll see ...

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by mzso

We're not even living with HEVC now. It's scarcely used. Websites use VP9 or AVC, home media is encoded in AVC.

I only came in contact with HEVC files via samples and files encoded for filesharing (and it's scarce even here).

yep, it has been a commercial flop so far. Apple's recent addition is the only major support they have had recently. A small number of tv broadcasters use it, uhd bluray and 4k streaming services but that is about it. hardly any torrents use it and those that do use a bitrate ridiculously low that it looks far worse. Unless a single patent group is formed with lower licensing costs and a cap for costs it is never going to become even vaguely as popular as h264.

Originally Posted by sneaker_ger

And it seems no one is creating VP9. E.g. if you buy a camcorder it will record AVC or HEVC, not VP9.

hardly any camcorders, point and shoot cameras or dslr's support hevc. Those are areas that should have adopted it years ago but still haven't.

[Motenai Yoda]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

yep, it has been a commercial flop so far. Apple's recent addition is the only major support they have had recently.

Yep, unless you count that almost all smartphones, smart tvs (especially those with uhd and hdr support), gpus, intel cpus, single board computers, tvboxes and uhd bluray players of those last 2 years can natively decode and/or encode hevc videos (apple is only a little last addiction on a large and consolidated panorama)
All streaming services as netflix, prime video, google film, itunes, youtube etc. uses hevc beside vp9 for 4k content.
All broadcasters need to use hevc on dvb-t2 trasmissions.
All UHD BD are encoded in hevc.

yep a very large "flop"

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by Motenai Yoda

Yep, unless you count that almost all smartphones, smart tvs (especially those with uhd and hdr support), gpus, intel cpus, single board computers, tvboxes and uhd bluray players of those last 2 years can natively decode and/or encode hevc videos (apple is only a little last addiction on a large and consolidated panorama)
All streaming services as netflix, prime video, google film, itunes, youtube etc. uses hevc beside vp9 for 4k content.
All broadcasters need to use hevc on dvb-t2 trasmissions.
All UHD BD are encoded in hevc.

yep a very large "flop"

This post is filled with nonsense:

1. broadcasters are not require to use hevc with dvb-t2, the uk uses h264+he-aac audio on dvb-t2.
2. youtube does not encode any videos in hevc.
3. tv's and smartphones may have hevc decoders but hardly any phones record videos in hevc and hardly any tv's receive broadcasts in hevc. Saying that because there are hardware decoders in lots of devices doesn't make it a success. Lots of devices have vp8 hardware decoders but that isn't a successful codec either.

[dapperdan]

Originally Posted by iwod

Apart from Desktop Web, I dont see any devices that has or would only have AV1 hardware decode support and not HEVC decode support. So the argument for Apple needing AV1 because they are trying to compete with Netflix in the future is moot.

I could imagine this applying to the next generation of Chromecast devices from Google.

I wonder if those video dongle's will lower hardware prices to the point where just shipping with free codec support would be a viable differentiation move for companies without a dog in the fight. Probably comes down to which content providers they consider essential and what those content providers in turn choose to do.

[GTPVHD]

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-moz...do-aging-jpeg/

[mzso]

Originally Posted by GTPVHD

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-moz...do-aging-jpeg/

Finally some promising news on this. I started to think that everyone in the alliance is too dumb to think of a brand new still image format.

[LigH]

Imagine, I once found a website which specialized in offering images in WebP format and was not just a format promoting site.

One.

User acceptance is hard to predict. If it doesn't offer more important advantages than just bandwidth saving (in times of VDSL and 4G), there may not be much incentive to use it. Just remember the overhead of external JavaScript modules required to keep your own source small.