If you’ve been paying attention to streaming tools for years, you’re probably excited to see the rumored AV1 codec support, which would be a huge step forward from codecs like H.264 and VP9, but there’s more to the story. Not only that. AV1, also known as AOMedia Video 1, was first released in 2018, but its promotion in the entire industry has been very slow. This time the author will sort out all the information about AV1 at once. Compared with H.264 and VP9, What advancements, and why is it important.
What is the AV1 codec? How does it make files smaller?
What is AV1?
History of AV1 Differences between AV1 and HEVC / H.265
The future of AV1
Why is AV1 so important for streaming devices like Google Chromecast HD?
What is AV1?
AV1 is made by A codec developed by the Alliance of Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium of many different companies in the technology field. Its main advantage is that it is license-free (so companies can implement it in their software for free), and VP9 can save a lot of costs compared to products such as H.264. Facebook Engineering conducted tests in 2018 and concluded that the AV1 reference encoder has a higher data compression rate than libvpx-vp9, x264 High profile and x264 Main respectively. profiles are 34%, 46.2% and 50.3% higher. This means that those with slower Internet speeds may be able to enjoy higher quality video than they are used to; for those with faster Internet speeds, you Will be able to obtain higher bit rates at the same connection speed.
The first smartphone chipset to support AV1 decoding is MediaTek Dimensity 1000, which supports up to 4K @60FPS. Nvidia Geforce 3000 series supports decoding, the new Nvidia Geforce 4000 series supports encoding and decoding, and Samsung's Exynos 2100/2200 also supports AV1 decoding. Subsequently, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 brought support for AV1 decoding, and it is rumored that the upcoming Tensor G3 will also support Will support AV1 encoding. Industry support is slowly growing, and the chipset in Chromecast HD can also support AV1 decoding.
Not only that, the computer web version of YouTube only needs to use a compatible browser And if it is enabled in the account settings, it can also support AV1 content. In fact, the company has designed its own chip for AV1 video encoding. The chip is code-named "Argos" and will be used in the YouTube data center. Argos is a second-generation video (Reverse) Coding Unit (VCU), which converts videos uploaded to the platform into various compression formats and optimizes them for different screen sizes. Google claims that the Argos VCU processes videos 20 to 20 times more efficiently than traditional servers. 33x.
History of AV1
The backstory about AV1 and why it was developed is also important. VP9, developed by Google, is a license-free codec that anyone can use, and because it It's free, so it can be used on any platform or service you want. YouTube is used on any device that supports the codec (Google saves a lot of money because of the reduced bandwidth), and it's even used by the likes of Netflix, Twitch, and Vimeo Used by streaming video on demand services.
However, since Google would benefit from using better compression algorithms to reduce bandwidth usage in its data centers, they began working on the next generation VP10 and announced that it is expected to Launched in 2016, updates will be released every 18 months. Although the compression rate of each video increases very slightly, it can save a lot of costs and significantly improve the user experience when processing hundreds of millions of minutes of video. Google even The code of VP10 has begun to be released, but the company later announced the cancellation of VP10 and established AOMedia instead.
AOMedia members include processor design (AMD, Arm, Broadcom, Chips&Media, Intel, Nvidia), to browser development (Google, Microsoft and Mozilla), to streaming media and video conferencing services (Adobe, Amazon, BBC R&D, Cisco, Netflix, YouTube), as well as Apple, Huawei, etc. are all involved. Whether it's through a hardware codec imported into the chipset, implementing the codec in the browser, or using the codec on a streaming service, all of these companies provide some form of support for AV1.
Differences between AV1 and HEVC / H.265
The biggest difference between AV1 and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) (also known as H.265) is licensing. In order to release a product that supports HEVC, developers need to start from at least four patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, Technicolor and Velos Media) and numerous other companies, many of which do not offer standard licensing contracts but require negotiation.
For Google Chrome, Opera, Netflix, Amazon Video, These high licensing fees are already a problem for products like Cisco WebEx Connect, Skype, and others, and projects like Mozilla Firefox completely rule out HEVC as an option. This is because it goes against many of Firefox's core values. Firefox needs to be license-free to run on Many FOSS projects are published, and the use of HEVC would block it. Mozilla believes in a free and open web, and if you promote a standard protected by patents, there is no feasibility. Even ignoring these two problems, Mozilla cannot afford to pay in licensing fees and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars negotiating the necessary licensing agreements.
An interesting fact is that these same issues prevented Firefox (and Chromium) from offering native H. 264 playback, and it still requires a plug-in on Linux. Firefox is unlikely to even support HEVC until its patent expires in the 2030s (or possibly later). Even today, Firefox only supports H.264 natively, which requires Credit to Cisco for paying all of Mozilla's licensing fees through OpenH264 in order to standardize H.264 before the next generation codec was ready for streaming in the market. In the Mozilla Video Codec Guide, the company Said "Mozilla will not support HEVC due to patent obstacles". So far, only Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer support native HEVC playback, and only on specific hardware that supports decoding.
In terms of efficiency , the two codecs are neck-and-neck. Their efficiency is generally comparable (although testing shows AV1 is slightly ahead), but there is a catch. AV1 generally takes longer to encode due to the lack of hardware encoding capabilities. Waterloo The University of Waterloo found in 2020 that although AV1 saves 9.5% of the bit rate compared to HEVC when encoding 4K videos, the encoding time of AV1 videos is also 590 times longer than AVC. In contrast, HEVC only It took 4.2 times longer. These tests were apparently conducted in the early days of AV1, when hardware support wasn't really available yet.
The future of AV1
As more and more devices become available With support for hardware decoding, AV1 will likely pave the way for high-definition compressed video playback. Given that HEVC is only supported by one browser on the desktop (Internet Explorer is now dead, anyway), AV1 is clearly a future successor to VP9 The codec of choice. As support continues to grow, more and more devices will eventually adopt it. There are already some experimental flags involving AV2 on the AOMedia repository, and AV2 research dedicated to the repository began last year. timing, which suggests we'll also see a follow-up to AV1 in the future.
For those of you eyeing smartphones preloaded with Android 14 when that version launches, you'll be happy to know that There will likely be AV1 support out of the box. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and MediaTek Dimensity 9000 series both support AV1, so in that sense there won't really be any hardware limitations anymore.
Why AV1 How important is a streaming device like the Google Chromecast HD?
If you want to buy a Google Chromecast HD, one of the big reasons you may care about AV1 is your network capabilities. If you buy the HD version instead of 4K, there may be a few One of the reasons why you're doing this might be that your network doesn't have the bandwidth for 4K streaming. The addition of AV1 means you can get higher bitrate video from your Chromecast, which will give you the same Get better overall video quality at network data rates.
Not only that, but the bigger reason is that it is the first truly mainstream TV accessory to actively support AV1. Roku is mainstream to a certain extent, but Limited to specific regions, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max is currently the only option, but again there are very large regional restrictions. Google’s TV accessory ecosystem is the most extensive to date, so the inclusion of AV1 is also very important thing. It makes AV1 mainstream an option and may push other companies to keep up with supporting AV1 in other ways.