Facebook (Instagram) no longer uses x264!

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

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?

AV1 supports HDR in the sense the spec supports the signaling and it supports 10-bit encoding. However HDR's PQ has some different psychovisual properties than SDR's good old gamma, and requires different tuning.

Anecdotally, AV1 encoders seem to have been struggling with this more than makes sense. Perhaps overengineering around SDR's perceptual nonlinearity? I don't see any fundamental spec-level reason why AV1 should struggle with HDR.

[excellentswordfight]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

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

AFAIK yes.

Originally Posted by FranceBB

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

Sorry, I was talking about UHD content on the Netflix platform. Were in my region its almost exclusively only offered for netflix productions which almost always also offer HDR aswell.

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

AV1 supports HDR in the sense the spec supports the signaling and it supports 10-bit encoding. However HDR's PQ has some different psychovisual properties than SDR's good old gamma, and requires different tuning.

Anecdotally, AV1 encoders seem to have been struggling with this more than makes sense. Perhaps overengineering around SDR's perceptual nonlinearity? I don't see any fundamental spec-level reason why AV1 should struggle with HDR.

I didnt mean it's unsupported by AV1, more in the context that its not implemented in this use case.

But more general speaking, is anyone else doing HDR with AV1 yet? Youtube?

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by excellentswordfight

But more general speaking, is anyone else doing HDR with AV1 yet? Youtube?

YouTube indeed has HDR AV1.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

YouTube indeed has HDR AV1.

All the YouTube 8K is AV1, including HDR.

Of course, YouTube, so quality is worse than premium 4K.

[Wobrivon]

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[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by Wobrivon

In addition to such parameters as resolution, frame rate, and picture quality, the decisive factor determining the final video size is the level of dynamism of the scene being shot. This can be explained by the general peculiarities of modern video codecs and H264 in particular.

Yeah, bitrate requirements for live sports or a grainy action movie can easily be 10x more than for simple animated line art.

[Blue_MiSfit]

One key point -- service providers almost never "switch" formats.

They add an additional format.

This is because they always have a large pool of "legacy" devices (relative to whatever cool new compression format we're talking about). It's very rare to actually turn off an old format. I imagine at this point Netflix has stopped encoding H.263 for their most primitive devices (original Nintendo Wii IIRC) but I'd be surprised if they no longer encode VC-1 for legacy Smooth Streaming endpoints.

For reference, VC-1 has been a legacy codec since probably ~2010.

A service like Netflix with a huge legacy device footprint and cutting edge support for modern formats would have to encode the following:

VC-1
H.264 Baseline, Main, and High profiles
HEVC
VP9
AV1

All of the above would be in many bitrates and resolutions. The "modern" codecs e.g. VP9, HEVC, AV1 would also have separate ladders in SDR, HDR10, and Dolby Vision.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

One key point -- service providers almost never "switch" formats.

They add an additional format.

This is because they always have a large pool of "legacy" devices (relative to whatever cool new compression format we're talking about). It's very rare to actually turn off an old format. I imagine at this point Netflix has stopped encoding H.263 for their most primitive devices (original Nintendo Wii IIRC) but I'd be surprised if they no longer encode VC-1 for legacy Smooth Streaming endpoints.

For reference, VC-1 has been a legacy codec since probably ~2010.

I'm not aware of any streaming services still delivering in VC-1 or H.263. Or even Baseline H.264 now. That says, PlaysForSure WMV with VC-1 was still supported on Prime Video until a few years ago.

Telling a customer with an otherwise working device they can't watch a given service anymore is a really bad look, and done only reluctantly. The industry breathed a big sigh of relief when Nintendo turned off all Wii services! Wii's were basically a bronze keyboard MacBook G3 in hardware. Single-core CPU without any HW decode support at all. Even sub-mediocre SD quality took bespoke encodes with a lot of tuning.

A service like Netflix with a huge legacy device footprint and cutting edge support for modern formats would have to encode the following:

VC-1
H.264 Baseline, Main, and High profiles
HEVC
VP9
AV1

All of the above would be in many bitrates and resolutions. The "modern" codecs e.g. VP9, HEVC, AV1 would also have separate ladders in SDR, HDR10, and Dolby Vision.

"Have to" is a bit overstated. One can get away with supporting just H.264 High Profile and HEVC these days.

I can't think of any VC-1 only devices that would still be in use.
H.264 has been a given in new devices for fifteen years now. Baseline-only devices vanished soon after, and Main only over a decade ago.

HEVC is pretty much required for doing UHD or HDR, but a HD SDR only service could get away with just H.264 (albeit with higher bandwidth costs and worse lower bitrate quality).

VP9 never really offered compelling compression efficiency, and was never a mainstream codec for premium services. Some did some stuff with it, but it practice didn't deliver better results than a well-tuned H.264 could do.

AV1 has some impressive low bitrate performance, but HW decoder and DRM implementations remain pretty rare. And it's unclear if there are practical benefits over HEVC for UHD or HDR with today's encoders. AV1 has promise if the ecosystem can get the Film Grain Synthesis process working reliably and perceptual optimizations get more mature. But VVC is coming to devices over the next couple of years, and VVC is manifestly superior to AV1 and all other previous codecs.

AV2 is in development, but is at least a couple of years from standardization, and won't see hardware implementations until after 2025. It's still at too early a stage to even ballpark its real-world performance compared to other codecs.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Good to hear everyone has turned off VC-1

I assumed NFLX or Prime still supported some really old devices where that was the best option but I guess I'm not THAT surprised now that I think about it.

Indeed a new service with a modern device footprint could pretty much get away with ONLY encoding HEVC nowadays, given the recent improvements to Chrome!

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

Good to hear everyone has turned off VC-1

I assumed NFLX or Prime still supported some really old devices where that was the best option but I guess I'm not THAT surprised now that I think about it.

It was true for quite a while. You could still download PlaysForSure WMV content from Prime Video long after devices that supported it stopped shipping. Maybe 3-4 years ago?

Indeed a new service with a modern device footprint could pretty much get away with ONLY encoding HEVC nowadays, given the recent improvements to Chrome!

Yeah.

It's always so much easier to start without legacy. Ten years ago I was so grateful we didn't need to deal with the legacy stuff that Netflix did, like MPEG-4 part 2 encodes for old mobile devices. But it always converges over time. Being able to deprecate ancient stuff like WMV and Wii support is always a great relief. It's not like an actually good experience was even possible on those devices.

The amount of engineering resources required to maintain support on older devices is tremendous, let alone keep feature and experience parity. Even a single brand of smart TV can have 20+ unique OS and SoC combinations currently supported.