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Video: The Past, Present and Future of AV1

Posted on 15th August 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

AV1 has strong backing from tech giants but is still seldom seen in the wild. Find out what the plans are for the future with Google’s Debargha Mukherjee.

Debargha’s intent in this talk is simple: to frame a description of what AV1 can do and is doing today in terms of the history of the codec and looking forward to the future and a potential AV2.

The talk starts by demonstrating the need for better video codecs not least of which is the statistic that by 2021, 81% of the internet’s traffic is expected to be video. But on top of that, there is a frustration with the slow decade-long refresh process which is traditional for video codecs. In order to match the new internet landscape with fast-evolving services, it seemed appropriate to have a codec which, not only delivered better encoding but also saw a quicker five-year refresh cycle.

As a comparison to the royalty-free AV1, Debargha then looks at VP9 it is deployed. Furthermore, VP10 who’s development was stopped and diverted into the AV1 effort which is then the topic for the next part of the talk; the Alliance for Open Media, the standardisation process and then a look at some of the encoding tools available to archive the stated aims.

To round off the description of what’s presently happening with AV1 trials of VP9, HEVC and AV1 are shown demonstrating AV1s ability to improve compression for a certain quality. Bitmovin and Facebook’s tests are also highlighted along with speed tests.

Looking, now, to the future, the talk finishes by explaining the future roadmap for hardware decoding and other expected milestones in the coming years plus the software work such as SVT-AV1 and DAV1D for optimised encoding and decoding. With the promised five-year cycle, we need to look forward now to AV2 and Debargha discusses what it might be and what it would need to achieve.

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Speaker

Debargha Mukherjee
Principal Software Engineer,
Google

Video: AV1 in video collaboration

Posted on 30th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

AV1 is famous for its promise to deliver better compression than HEVC but also for it being far from real-time. This talk has a demonstration of the world’s first real-time AV1 video call showing that speed improvement are on the way and, indeed, some have arrived.

Encoding is split into ‘tools’ so where you might hear of ‘h.264’ or ‘MPEG 2’, these are names for a whole set of different ways of looking at – and squeezing down – a picture. They also encompass the rules of how they should act together to form a cohesive encoding mechanism. (To an extent, such codecs tend to define only how the decode should happen, leaving encoding open to innovation.) AV1 contains many tools, many of which are complex and so require a lot of time even from today’s fast computers.

Cisco’s Thomas Davies, who created the BBC’s Dirac codec which is now standardised under SMPTE’s VC-2 standard, points out that whilst these tools are complex, AV1 also has a lot of them and this diversity of choice is actually a benefit for speed and in particular for the speed of software codecs.

After demonstrating the latency and bandwidth benefits of their live, bi-directional, AV1 implementation against AVC, Thomas looks at the deployment possibilities and of AV1. The talk finishes with a summary of what AV1 brings in benefits to sum up why this new effort, with the Alliance of Open Media, is worth it.

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Speaker

Thomas Davies
Principal Engineer,
Cisco Media Engineering, UK

Video: AV1/VVC Update

Posted on 22nd May 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

AV1 and VVC are both new codecs on the scene. Codecs touch our lives every day both at work and at home. They are the only way that anyone receives audio and video online and television. So all together they’re pretty important and finding better ones generates a lot of opinion.

So what are AV1 and VVC? VVC is one of the newest codecs on the block and is undergoing standardisation in MPEG. VVC builds on the technologies standardised by HEVC but adds many new coding tools. The standard is likely to enter draft phase before the end of 2019 resulting in it being officially standardised around a year later. For more info on VVC, check out Bitmovin’s VVC intro from Demuxed

AV1 is a new but increasingly known codec, famous for being royalty free and backed by Netflix, Apple and many other big hyper scale players. There have been reports that though there is no royalty levied on it, patent holders have still approached big manufacturers to discuss financial reimbursement so its ‘free’ status is a matter of debate. Whilst there is a patent defence programme, it is not known if it’s sufficient to insulate larger players. Much further on than VVC, AV1 has already had a code freeze and companies such as Bitmovin have been working hard to reduce the encode times – widely known to be very long – and create live services.

Here, Christian Feldmann from Bitmovin gives us the latest status on AV1 and VVC. Christian discusses AV1’s tools before discussing VVC’s tools pointing out the similarities that exist. Whilst AV1 is being supported in well known browsers, VVC is at the beginning.

There’s a look at the licensing status of each codec before a look at EVC – which stands for Essential Video Coding. This has a royalty free baseline profile so is of interest to many. Christian shares results from a Technicolor experiment.

Speakers

Christian Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin

Video: Into the Depths: The Technical Details behind AV1

Posted on 10th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As we wait for the dust to settle on this NAB’s AV1 announcements hearing who’s added support for AV1 and what innovations have come because of it, we know that the feature set is frozen and that some companies will be using it. So here’s a chance to go in to some of the detail.

AV1 is being created by the AOM, the Alliance for Open Media, of which Mozilla is a founding member. The IETF is considering it for standardisation under their NetVC working group and implementations have started. On The Broadcast Knowledge, we have seen explanations from Xiph.org, one of the original contributors to AV1. We’ve seen how it fares against HEVC with Ian Trow and how HDR can be incorporated in it from Google and Warwick University. For a complete list of all AV1 content, have a look here.

Now, we join Nathan Egge who talks us through many of the different tools within AV1 including one which often captures the imagination of people; AV1’s ability to remove film grain ahead of encoding and then add back in synthesised grain on playback. Nathan also looks ahead in the Q&A talking about integration into RTP, WebRTC and why Broadcasters would want to use AV1.

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Speaker