H.264

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.

Watch now!

Speaker

Thomas Davies Principal Engineer, Cisco Media Engineering, UK