AV1

Video: AV1/VVC Update

Posted on 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 Christian Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin

Video: Into the Depths: The Technical Details behind AV1

Posted on 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.

Watch now!

Speaker

Nathan Egge Nathan Egge
Video Codec Engineer,
Mozilla

Video: VP9 Transcoding for Live eSports Broadcast

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

VP9 is a well-known codec, but it hasn’t seen many high-profile, live deployments which makes Twitch’s move to deliver their platform using VP9 in preference over AVC all the more interesting.

Here, Yueshi Shen from Twitch, explains the rationale for VP9 by explaining the scale of Twitch and looking at their AVC bitrate demands. He explains the patent issues with HEVC and VP9 then looks at decoder support across devices and platforms. Importantly, encoder implementation is examined leading to Twitch’s choice of FPGA to provide live encoding.

Yueshi then looks at the potential of AV1 to Switch_Frame to provide low-latency broadcast at scale.

Watch now!

Speaker

Yueshi Shen Yueshi Shen
Principal (Level 7) Research Engineer & Engineering Manager,
Twitch

Video: The state of advanced codecs; separating hype from reality

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are a lot of codecs both new and old that are in use or vying to be the next big thing. Tom Vaughan helps us see what they really can achieve and where each one is useful.

Recorded at San Francisco Video Tech Meetup in September, this video starts with a look at a the ‘hype cycle’. Tom places each codec, from MPEG 2 to VVC on the curve before looking at what the barriers to adoption are.

Tom then looks at HEVC discussing which devices can receive it, which can create it, the streaming services which support it and where adoption is likely to be. Finally, HEVC discussion is complete without a look at the HEVC patent landscape Venn diagram.

The focus then shifts to the Alliance for Open Media and their AV1 codec, its patent status and technical progress to date. He then discusses the performance of AV1, HEVC and Beamr against each other.

Almost brand new out of the starting blocks is VVC from MPEG and the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF). Tom explains the aims of the forum and the VVC codec they are creating before taking questions from the floor.

Watch now!

Speaker

Tom Vaughan Tom Vaughan
VP Strategy,
Beamr