Hi

Hi there, Foss North Folks!

Last updated: 2018-04-23

Flaki, tinkering

István Szmozsánszky "Flaki"
@slsoftworks

JavaScript

JavaScript developer/trainer

Mozilla TechSpeakers

Mozilla TechSpeakers & DevRel

Tessel

Tessel Project — JS 💖 HW

AV1

the magical open video future of the web

István Szmozsánszky "Flaki"
@slsoftworks

Daala

"…a video format that's free to implement, use and distribute…"

https://wiki.xiph.org/Daala

"…and a reference implementation with technical performance superior to H.265."

Many grew discontent with the status quo…

not thor

Cisco Thor

not vp9

VP9

This brought about
  an unlikely alliance…

A Royal(ty) Mess

Okay, so this all looks too good to be true.
What's the catch?

Availability

  • :( - It's so new, it barely exists anywhere.
  • :| - It's already in Firefox Nightly a
  • :) - Open source and patent-unencumbered, this helps the adoption. VLC already ships with an (experimental) AV1 decoder since the February 3.0.0 version.

Expected that products (e.g. browsers) would be shipping support by end of year.

From the industry, Netflix promises to be an early adopter, as well as Google (Youtube?).

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html

Encoding


The encoder is currently in a state of being a "research-grade" code base.

What this means is encoding is fairly unoptimized (50-200x slower than VP9), requires a lot of resources and time.

  • :( - Live streaming, WebRTC?
  • :| - Youtube and other pre-encoded sources
  • :) - Netflix and streaming services with a smaller catalog.

Decoding

  • :( - No hardware support just yet, that means playback will drain battery faster compared to other formats.
  • :) - Bitstream has evolved in close cooperation with hardware vendors, decoding hardware should be 1-2 years out, and after that it will be just as commonplace in CPUs, GPUs as any other technology. Being patent-unencumbered also helps adoption.

1080p decoding on a conventional, consumer-grade laptop at ~25% CPU with current (fairly unoptimized codebase)

Learn More

Thanks a bunch!

talk.flak.is/av1/fossnorth

mozhacks @mozhacks

Flaki @slsoftworks

Keep compressin'!