Facebook (Instagram) no longer uses x264!

[PCU]

Facebook (Instagram) no longer uses x264!

File downloaded from Insta:

Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media
Codec ID : isom (isom/iso2/avc1/mp41)
File size : 817 KiB
Duration : 13 s 488 ms
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 496 kb/s

Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Main@L3.1
Format settings : CABAC / 5 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, Reference fra : 5 frames
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 13 s 367 ms
Bit rate : 445 kb/s
Maximum bit rate : 707 kb/s
Width : 652 pixels
Height : 1 160 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 0.562
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 30.000 FPS
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.020
Stream size : 727 KiB (89%)
Color range : Limited
Color primaries : BT.709
Transfer characteristics : BT.709
Matrix coefficients : BT.709
Codec configuration box : avcC

Audio
ID : 2
Format : AAC LC SBR
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec Low Complexity with Spectral Band Replication
Commercial name : HE-AAC
Format settings : NBC
Codec ID : mp4a-40-5
Duration : 13 s 488 ms
Duration_LastFrame : -26 ms
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 48.0 kb/s
Maximum bit rate : 55.7 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel layout : L R
Sampling rate : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate : 21.533 FPS (2048 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 78.4 KiB (10%)
Default : Yes
Alternate group : 1

[Blue_MiSfit]

What makes you think that? They may very well be using another encoder, but they might be just not writing the x264 info SEI

[PCU]

Because until a few months ago, MediaInfo showed x264 settings.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Originally Posted by PCU

Because until a few months ago, MediaInfo showed x264 specs.

The reason why MediaInfo and similar tools can show "x264 specs" is that the x264 encoder, by default, embeds that information into the H.264 stream, as a custom SEI message.

H.264 decoders simply ignore this "unknown" custom SEI message. MediaInfo knows what to look for and how to interpret it. Anyway, the custom SEI message is not needed by any means; it's just some "diagnostic" information.

Therefore, x264 could trivially be modified to not write the custom SEI message. Or the custom SEI message could be removed – intentionally or incidental – by whatever MP4(?) muxer they use.

So, as Blue_MiSfit already pointed out, the lack of x264 custom SEI message alone is not a prove that the stream wasn't created by x264. An x264 developer probably could tell by looking at the stream in detail though...

[PCU]

Originally Posted by LoRd_MuldeR

The reason why MediaInfo and similar tools can show "x264 specs" is that the x264 encoder, by default, embeds that information into the H.264 stream, as a custom SEI message.

H.264 decoders simply ignore this "unknown" custom SEI message. MediaInfo knows what to look for and how to interpret it. Anyway, the custom SEI message is not needed by any means; it's just some "diagnostic" information.

Therefore, x264 could trivially be modified to not write the custom SEI message. Or the custom SEI message could be removed – intentionally or incidental – by whatever MP4(?) muxer they use.

So, as Blue_MiSfit already pointed out, the lack of x264 custom SEI message alone is not a prove that the stream wasn't created by x264. An x264 developer probably could tell by looking at the stream in detail though...

Strange!: some Insta videos are MKV (VP9/HE-AAC)
Here is the MP4 file downloaded from Tesla Page: (Lavf58.20.100)
https://www.mediafire.com/file/5fkdz...ideos.mp4/file

Insta is switching to: MKV (VP9/AAC)!

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by PCU

Insta is switching to: MKV (VP9/AAC)!

MPEG-LA, making yet another company fly away from MPEG Codecs...

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

MPEG-LA, making yet another company fly away from MPEG Codecs...

Facebook has been saying they're doing that for years. But with so many devices without VP9 or AV1, H.264 remains the only codec one can encode to if one wants to encode just one thing. Beyond H.264 requires either a multi-codec strategy or a limited set of players (I think Apple TV is only HEVC, and just isn't available on non-HEVC devices).

Doing multi-codec VP9 isn't such a big deal for web browsers and short form user-generated content without DRM, as the major browsers all include software VP9 decoders. It's movie-length content (due to battery life) and premium content (due to hardware DRM requirements) where using real hardware decoders makes a big difference.

[FranceBB]

Open it with an HEX editor like CFF Explorer. Sometimes mediainfo alone isn't enough.
Besides I don't think Facebook encodes anything, they're probably relying on some third party service to encode everything like akamai, Aws, Bitmovin etc. Perhaps they changed whatever they were using. Chances are that if it ain't x264, then it's very likely to be MainConcept

[Blue_MiSfit]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

Besides I don't think Facebook encodes anything, they're probably relying on some third party service to encode everything like akamai, Aws, Bitmovin etc.

Oh no, they absolutely do their own encoding. Dave Ronca of Netflix fame runs their encoding team.

The amount of video they serve is staggering, so I'm certain they spend a lot of time optimizing this.

Here's their blog: https://engineering.fb.com/category/video-engineering/

[ksec]

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

Oh no, they absolutely do their own encoding. Dave Ronca of Netflix fame runs their encoding team.

The amount of video they serve is staggering, so I'm certain they spend a lot of time optimizing this.

Here's their blog: https://engineering.fb.com/category/video-engineering/

Yes and he was the one who help push FB to VP9. But considering 95%+ of their traffic are from Mobile, and vast majority of Mobile sans Apple have support for VP9. It make sense to switch to VP9 for them. This is very different to Youtube where they have access from TV, Mobile, Desktop and Tablet.

And before TikTok was a thing FB was the largest competitor to Youtube in terms of Online Video.

Luckily they stayed away from AVIF and seems to be pushing for JPEG-XL.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by ksec

Yes and he was the one who help push FB to VP9. But considering 95%+ of their traffic are from Mobile, and vast majority of Mobile sans Apple have support for VP9. It make sense to switch to VP9 for them. This is very different to Youtube where they have access from TV, Mobile, Desktop and Tablet.

I would have thought that >>10% of Facebook video would be desktop. Of course, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge all support VP9 as well. It's really living room devices where there might not be VP9 decoders.

Luckily they stayed away from AVIF and seems to be pushing for JPEG-XL.

What is that lucky?

[PCU]

Soon everyone is using MKV (AV1/Opus), no one knows the exact time. I don't think anyone will use H.266 in the future.
It's like FLAC vs: WMAL, MLP, MPEG-4 ALS, MPEG-4 SLS, RealAudio Lossless, ATRAC Advanced Lossless, mp3HD, etc!
Apple is using a codec that it designed on the iPhone 13 and I think all iPhones 14: ProRes.
On Android: needless to say: AV1/Opus.

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by PCU

Apple is using a codec that it designed on the iPhone 13 and I think all iPhones 14: ProRes.

Speaking of ProRes, Apple has been more and more bastard-ish by artificially blocking perfectly valid ProRes files encoded by anything that isn't an Apple approved encoder.
For instance, FFMpeg files are all blocked on Apple devices unless you spoof the writing library as Apple with:

-vendor apl0

Originally Posted by PCU

Soon everyone is using MKV (AV1/Opus), no one knows the exact time.

Uhm... I wouldn't be so sure about it.

Originally Posted by PCU

I don't think anyone will use H.266 in the future.

Except for broadcasters and studios for the next generation of TX and BD, which is probably gonna be 8K 50p 12bit HDR PQ BT2100 in PAL territories and 8K 60p 12bit HDR PQ BT2100 in NTSC territories, both in H.266.
Still, MPEG-LA should really be learning from the mistakes of the past and open up a bit if they wanna see a wider adoption of H.266 VVC, unless, of course, they don't care about anything other than the broadcasting market... :/

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

Oh no, they absolutely do their own encoding. Dave Ronca of Netflix fame runs their encoding team.
The amount of video they serve is staggering, so I'm certain they spend a lot of time optimizing this.

Ah! I didn't know that.

Originally Posted by PCU

Once the encodings are made, Facebook’s video encoding system tries to further improve the viewing experience

Whatever. I've uploaded 3840x2160 60p yv12 8bit planar Linear BT709 SDR H.265 100 Mbit/s recordings of me diving on Facebook this summer and it literally DESTROYED everything.
First of all, they downscaled to 1280x720, the dropped the framerate from 60p to 30p and they re-encoded with such a low bitrate that all the algae and the fish hiding became a macroblock mess. Very disappointed. The reason is that you can upload vertical videos in 1080p, but not horizontal ones (horizontal ones get downscaled to 720p). This sort of compression and resize might be ok for people taking selfies and posting stories with the front camera in vertical and with thousands of useless filters, but for not for general purpose contents like the one I posted.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

Except for broadcasters and studios for the next generation of TX and BD, which is probably gonna be 8K 50p 12bit HDR PQ BT2100 in PAL territories and 8K 60p 12bit HDR PQ BT2100 in NTSC territories, both in H.266.

I don't know of any broadcasters outside of major TV-exporting countries talking about 8K broadcasting at all. Even 4K broadcasting (as in terrestrial/cable/sat) remains pretty rare due to the bandwidth requirements. Of course, VVC is capable of doing 4K in less bandwidth than AVC 1080p. In the end, there really isn't evidence of moving image content that customers can discriminate between a 4K and an 8K encode watching on an 8K screen.

Still, MPEG-LA should really be learning from the mistakes of the past and open up a bit if they wanna see a wider adoption of H.266 VVC, unless, of course, they don't care about anything other than the broadcasting market... :/

If only it was just MPEG-LA. The problem with HEVC is all the patent holders who went to MPEG Advance and the other one instead of doing everything through MPEG-LA, who was quite successful with MPEG-2 and AVC.

[PCU]

How we used to encode video on Facebook
Traditionally, once a video is uploaded to Facebook, the process to enable ABR kicks in and the original video is quickly re-encoded into multiple resolutions (e.g., 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p). Once the encodings are made, Facebook’s video encoding system tries to further improve the viewing experience by using more advanced codecs, such as VP9, or more expensive “recipes” (a video industry term for fine-tuning transcoding parameters), such as H264 very slow profile, to compress the video file as much as possible. Different transcoding technologies (using different codec types or codec parameters) have different trade-offs between compression efficiency, visual quality, and how much computing power is needed.

The question of how to order jobs in a way that maximizes the overall experience for everyone has already been top of mind. Facebook has a specialized encoding compute pool and dispatcher. It accepts encoding job requests that have a priority value attached to them and puts them into a priority queue where higher-priority encoding tasks are processed first. The video encoding system’s job is then to assign the right priority to each task. It did so by following a list of simple, hard-coded rules. Encoding tasks could be assigned a priority based on a number of factors, including whether a video is a licensed music video, whether the video is for a product, and how many friends or followers the video’s owner has.

But there were disadvantages to this approach. As new video codecs became available, it meant expanding the number of rules that needed to be maintained and tweaked. Since different codecs and recipes have different computing requirements, visual quality, and compression performance trade-offs, it is impossible to fully optimize the end user experience by a coarse-grained set of rules.

And, perhaps most important, Facebook’s video consumption pattern is extremely skewed, meaning Facebook videos are uploaded by people and pages that have a wide spectrum in terms of their number of friends or followers. Compare the Facebook page of a big company like Disney with that of a vlogger that might have 200 followers. The vlogger can upload their video at the same time, but Disney’s video is likely to get more watch time. However, any video can go viral even if the uploader has a small following. The challenge is to support content creators of all sizes, not just those with the largest audiences, while also acknowledging the reality that having a large audience also likely means more views and longer watch times.

[ognirats]

Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec

Isn't AVC just h264?

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by ognirats

Isn't AVC just h264?

Yes, AVC is H.264, just like HEVC is H.265 and VVC is H.266 eheheheh

[PCU]

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ne...av1-codec.html

Netflix starts streaming content to TVs though AV1 codec
by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 11/11/2021 09:41 AM | source: netflixtechblog | 2 comment(s)
Netflix starts streaming content to TVs though AV1 codec
Netflix has begun broadcasting content that has been encoded with the AV1 codec. In this case, it is specifically about streaming to televisions and not smartphones.

AV1 is the first high-efficiency video codec format with a royalty-free license from Alliance of Open Media (AOMedia), made possible by wide-ranging industry commitment of expertise and resources. Netflix is proud to be a founding member of AOMedia and a key contributor to the development of AV1. The specification of AV1 was published in 2018. Since then, we have been working hard to bring AV1 streaming to Netflix members. Netflix said that all of its AV1 streams are encoded in 10-bit and in the highest available resolution and frame rate including HFR – but not yet HDR. Netflix did not specify bitrates other than saying that "AV1 delivers videos with improved visual quality at the same bitrate" compared to MPEG4 and HEVC and that "some streams have a peak bitrate close to the upper limit allowed by the spec", which probably refers to AV1 level 5.0 (30 Mb/s bitrate for Main) or level 5.1 (40 Mb/s bitrate for Main).

- "Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to TVs. With this advanced encoding format, we are confident that Netflix can deliver an even more amazing experience to our members," Netflix wrote in a blog post. "We compared AV1 to other codecs over thousands of Netflix titles, and saw significant compression efficiency improvements from AV1."

In February 2020, Netflix started streaming AV1 to the Android mobile app. The Android launch leveraged the open-source software decoder dav1d built by the VideoLAN, VLC, and FFmpeg communities and sponsored by AOMedia. We were very pleased to see that AV1 streaming improved members’ viewing experience, particularly under challenging network conditions.

While software decoders enable AV1 playback for more powerful devices, a majority of Netflix members enjoy their favorite shows on TVs. AV1 playback on TV platforms relies on hardware solutions, which generally take longer to be deployed.

Throughout 2020 the industry made impressive progress on AV1 hardware solutions. Semiconductor companies announced decoder SoCs for a range of consumer electronics applications. TV manufacturers released TVs ready for AV1 streaming. Netflix has also partnered with YouTube to develop an open-source solution for an AV1 decoder on game consoles that utilizes the additional power of GPUs. It is amazing to witness the rapid growth of the ecosystem in such a short time.

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to TVs. With this advanced encoding format, we are confident that Netflix can deliver an even more amazing experience to our members. In this techblog, we share some details about our efforts for this launch as well as the benefits we foresee for our members.

[excellentswordfight]

Originally Posted by PCU

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ne...av1-codec.html

Netflix starts streaming content to TVs though AV1 codec
by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 11/11/2021 09:41 AM | source: netflixtechblog | 2 comment(s)
Netflix starts streaming content to TVs though AV1 codec
Netflix has begun broadcasting content that has been encoded with the AV1 codec. In this case, it is specifically about streaming to televisions and not smartphones.

AV1 is the first high-efficiency video codec format with a royalty-free license from Alliance of Open Media (AOMedia), made possible by wide-ranging industry commitment of expertise and resources. Netflix is proud to be a founding member of AOMedia and a key contributor to the development of AV1. The specification of AV1 was published in 2018. Since then, we have been working hard to bring AV1 streaming to Netflix members. Netflix said that all of its AV1 streams are encoded in 10-bit and in the highest available resolution and frame rate including HFR – but not yet HDR. Netflix did not specify bitrates other than saying that "AV1 delivers videos with improved visual quality at the same bitrate" compared to MPEG4 and HEVC and that "some streams have a peak bitrate close to the upper limit allowed by the spec", which probably refers to AV1 level 5.0 (30 Mb/s bitrate for Main) or level 5.1 (40 Mb/s bitrate for Main).

- "Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to TVs. With this advanced encoding format, we are confident that Netflix can deliver an even more amazing experience to our members," Netflix wrote in a blog post. "We compared AV1 to other codecs over thousands of Netflix titles, and saw significant compression efficiency improvements from AV1."

In February 2020, Netflix started streaming AV1 to the Android mobile app. The Android launch leveraged the open-source software decoder dav1d built by the VideoLAN, VLC, and FFmpeg communities and sponsored by AOMedia. We were very pleased to see that AV1 streaming improved members’ viewing experience, particularly under challenging network conditions.

While software decoders enable AV1 playback for more powerful devices, a majority of Netflix members enjoy their favorite shows on TVs. AV1 playback on TV platforms relies on hardware solutions, which generally take longer to be deployed.

Throughout 2020 the industry made impressive progress on AV1 hardware solutions. Semiconductor companies announced decoder SoCs for a range of consumer electronics applications. TV manufacturers released TVs ready for AV1 streaming. Netflix has also partnered with YouTube to develop an open-source solution for an AV1 decoder on game consoles that utilizes the additional power of GPUs. It is amazing to witness the rapid growth of the ecosystem in such a short time.

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to TVs. With this advanced encoding format, we are confident that Netflix can deliver an even more amazing experience to our members. In this techblog, we share some details about our efforts for this launch as well as the benefits we foresee for our members.

Maybe more fitting for the AV1 section. Either way, my first thought was that isnt it a bit odd using AV1 for uhd given the fact that doesnt support HDR. Like how many TVs has av1 support and not HDR-support? I assume that the HDR stream will be preferred if the tv-set support it. I dont know how it is in other regions, but were I live its pretty much only netflix premium content that offer UHD, and that content almost always has an hdr stream. So how many will actually stream the AV1 top stream?

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

Either way, my first thought was that isn't it a bit odd using AV1 for uhd given the fact that doesnt support HDR.

Totally. I mean, the overwhelming majority of UHD contents are either HLG or PQ so limiting it to BT2020 SDR or BT709 SDR is a bit diminishing, however I believe they're trying to do this to make the codec being adopted.

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

Like how many TVs has av1 support and not HDR-support? I assume that the HDR stream will be preferred if the tv-set support it.

Very few I think. Uhm... is Netflix encoding in standard H.265 the HDR streams?

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

I dont know how it is in other regions, but were I live its pretty much only netflix premium content that offer UHD

If you're in the UK, Deutschland or Italy, we're here (Sky) with UHD HDR contents in H.265 25 Mbit/s 4:2:0 10bit planar in HLG BT2020nc ehehehehe

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

UHD contents almost always have an hdr stream. So how many will actually stream the AV1 top stream?

Probably few, then, but I believe it's a start. Still, this is only a streaming-platforms approach 'cause at least in broadcasting MPEG-2 flies high for SD, H.264 flies high for FULL HD and H.265 flies high for UHD and I believe there's gonna be H.266 VVC very soon for 8K.