Andrey Norkin Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

With two years of development and deployments under its belt, AV1 is still emerging on to the codec scene. That’s not to say that it’s no in use billions of times a year, but compared to the incumbents, there’s still some distance to go. Known as very slow to encode and computationally impractical, today’s panel is here to say that’s old news and AV1 is now a real-time codec.

Brought together by Jill Boyce with Intel, we hear from Amazon, Facebook, Googles, Amazon, Twitch, Netflix and Tencent in this panel. Intel and Netflix have been collaborating on the SVT-AV1 encoder and decoder framework for two years. The SVT-AV1 encoder’s goal was to be a high-performance and scalable encoder and decoder, using parallelisation to achieve this aim.

Yueshi Shen from Amazon and Twitch is first to present, explaining that for them, AV1 is a key technology in the 5G area. They have put together a 1440p, 120fps games demo which has been enabled by AV1. They feel that this resolution and framerate will be a critical feature for Twitch in the next two years as computer games increasingly extend beyond typical broadcast boundaries. Another key feature is achieving an end-to-end latency of 1.5 seconds which, he says, will partly be achieved using AV1. His company has been working with SOC vendors to accelerate the adoption of AV1 decoders as their proliferation is key to a successful transition to AV1 across the board. Simultaneously, AWS has been adding AV1 capability to MediaConvert and is planning to continue AV1 integration in other turnkey content solutions.

David Ronca from Facebook says that AV1 gives them the opportunity to reduce video egress bandwidth whilst also helping increase quality. For them, SVT-AV1 has brought using AV1 into the practical domain and they are able to run AV1 payloads in production as well as launch a large-scale decoder test across a large set of mobile devices.

Matt Frost represent’s Google Chrome and Android’s point of view on AV1. Early adopters, having been streaming partly using AV1 since 2018 in resolution small and large, they have recently added support in Duo, their Android video-conferencing application. As with all such services, the pandemic has shown how important they can be and how important it is that they can scale. Their move to AV1 streaming has had favourable results which is the start of the return on their investment in the technology.

Google’s involvement with the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), along with the other founding companies, was born out of a belief that in order to achieve the scales needed for video applications, the only sensible future was with cheap-to-deploy codecs, so it made a lot of sense to invest time in the royalty-free AV1.

Andrey Norkin from Netflix explains that they believe AV1 will bring a better experience to their members. Netflix has been using AV1 in streaming since February 2020 on android devices using a software decoder. This has allowed them to get better quality at lower bitrates than VP9 Testing AV1 on other platforms. Intent on only using 10-bit encodes across all devices, Andrey explains that this mode gives the best efficiency. As well as being founding members of AoM, Netflix has also developed AVIF which is an image format based on AV1. According to Andrey, they see better performance than most other formats out there. As AVIF works better with text on pictures than other formats, Netflix are intending to use it in their UI.

Tencent’s Shan Liu explains that they are part of the AoM because video compression is key for most Tencent businesses in their vast empire. Tencent cloud has already launched an AV1 transcoding service and support AV1 in VoD.

The panel discusses low-latency use of AV1, with Dave Ronca explaining that, with the performance improvements of the encoder and decoders along-side the ability to tune the decode speed of AV1 by turning on and off certain tools, real-time AV1 are now possible. Amazon is paying attention to low-end, sub $300 handsets, according to Yueshi, as they believe this will be where the most 5G growth will occur so site recent tests showing decoding AV1 in only 3.5 cores on a mobile SOC as encouraging as it’s standard to have 8 or more. They have now moved to researching battery life.

The panel finishes with a Q&A touching on encoding speed, the VVC and LCEVC codecs, the Sisvel AV1 patent pool, the next ramp-up in deployments and the roadmap for SVT-AV1.

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Speakers

	Yueshi Shen Principle Engineer AWS & Twitch
	David Ronca Video Infrastructure Team, Facebook
	Matt Frost Product Manager, Chome Media Technologies, Google
	Andrey Norkin Emerging Technologies Team Netflix
	Dr Shan Liu Chief Scientist & General Manager, Tencent Media Lab
	Jill Boyce Intel

Netflix have continually been pushing forward video compression and analysis because their assets are played so many times that every bit saved is real money saved. VMAF is a great example of Netflix’s desire to push the state of the art forward. Developed by Netflix and two universities, this new objective metric allowed them to better evaluate the quality of videos using computer analysis and has continued to be the foundation of their work since.

One use of VMAF has been to verify the results of Netflix’s Per-Shot Encoding method which alters encoding parameters for each shot of the film rather than using a fixed set of parameters for the whole film. The Broadcast Knowledge has featured talks on their previous technique, per-title encoding (among others).

AV1, however must be the most famous innovation that Neflix is behind. A founding member of the Alliance for Open Media (AoM), Netflix saw a need a for a better codec and by making an open one, which also played to the needs of other internet giants such as Google, was a good way to create a vibrant community around it driving submissions to the codec itself but also, it is hoped, in the implementation and adoption.

In this two-part talk, LiWei Guo starts off by explaining the ways in which AV1 will be used by Netflix. Since this talk took place, Netflix has started streaming in AV1 to Android clients. LiWei points out that AV1 supports 10-bit video as standard – a notable difference from other codecs like AVC and HEVC. This allows Netflix to use 10-bit without worrying about decoder compatibility and he shows examples of skies and water which are significantly by the use of 10-bit.

Another feature of AV1 is the Film Grain synthesis which seeks to improve encoding efficiency by removing the random film grain of the source during the encode process then inserting a similar random noise on top to recreate the same look and feel. As anything random can’t be predicted, noise such of this is very wasteful for a codec to try and encode, therefore it’s not <a surprise that this can result in as much as a 30% reduction in bitrate. Before concluding, LiWei briefly explains per-shot encoding then shows data showing the overall improvements.

Andrey Norkin, also from Netflix explains their work with Intel on the SVT-AV1 software video encoder which leverages Intel’s SVT technology, a framework optimised for Xeon chips for video encoding and analysis. Netflix’s motivations are to further increase adoption by delivering a data centre-ready, optimised encoder and to create an AV1 encoder they can use to support their own internal research activities (did someone say AV2?). SVT allows for parallelisation, important for any computer nowadays with so many cores available.

Finishing up, Andrey points us to the Github repository, lets us know the development statement (as of November 2019) and looks at the speed increases that have taken off, comparing SVT-AV1 against the reference libaom encoder.

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Speakers