"Set for a year-end release, AV2 is not only an upgrade to the widely adopted AV1 but also a foundational piece of AOMedia’s future tech stack.
AV2, a generation leap in open video coding and the answer to the world’s growing streaming demands, delivers significantly better compression performance than AV1. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. AV2 marks a milestone on the path to an open, innovative future of media experiences."
sigh
I literally just bought a 3050 for my NAS for AV1 support.
/wrists
you didn’t do the wrong thing.
what many people don’t notice is that support for a codec in gpu(in hardware) is two part. one is decoding and one is encoding.
for quality video nobody does hardware encoding (at least not on consumer systems linux this 3050 nvidia)
for most users the important this is hardware support for decoding so that they can watch their 4k movie with no issue.
so you are in the clear.
you can watch av1 right now and when av2 becomes popular enough to be used in at least 4 years from now.
AV1 was mid. Extremely slow encoding and minor performance gains over H265. And no good encoders on release.
H266 was miles ahead but that is propriatary like 265. So win some lose some.
Compression and efficiency is often a trade-off. H266 is also much slower than AV1, under same conditions. Hopefully there will come more AV1 hw encoders to speed things up… but at least the AV1 decoders are already relatively common.
Also, the gap between h265 and AV1 is higher than between AV1 and h266. So I’d argue it’s the other way around. AV1 is reported to be capable of ~30-50% bitrate savings over h.265 at the cost of speed. H266 differences with AV1 are minor, it’s reported to get a similar range, but more balanced towards the 50% side and at the cost of even lower speed. I’d say once AV1 encoding hardware is more common and the higher presets for AV1 become viable it’d be a good balance for most cases.
The thing is that h26x has a consortium of corporations behind with connections and an interest to ensure they can cash in on their investment, so they get a lot of traction to get hw out.
Looking ahead, 53% of AOMedia members surveyed plan to adopt AV2 within 12 months upon its finalization later this year, with 88% expecting to implement it within the next two years.
From AOMedia website. So the plan is for it to have AV1 levels of adoption by 2028.
So… a lot more people now have :
- 4G/5G on the go and proper broadband at home and office and even in unique location (sadly via MuskSat for now…) other ways to get data
- very capable devices in mobile phones, (mostly Android) clients e.g. video projector or dongles, of course computers
- human eyes… that can’t really appreciate 4K on average
… so obviously we should NOT stop looking for more efficient ways and new usages but I’m also betting that we are basically reaching diminishing return already. I don’t think a lot of people care anymore about much high screen resolution or frequency for typical video streaming. Because that’s the most popular usage I imagine everything else, e.g XR, becomes relative to it niche and thus has a hard time benefiting as much from the growth in performances we had until now.
TL;DR: OK cool but aren’t we already flattening the curve on the most popular need anyway?
It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.
Thanks for the clarification, it makes me wonder though, is it bandwidth saving at no user cost? i.e is the compression improved without requiring more compute at the end to decompress?
Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.
Then it’s arguably delegating some of the cost to the final user, large streaming companies spending a bit less on IXP contracts while viewers have to have newer hardware that might need a bit more energy too to run.
On the upside, the end user needs to use up less data for the same content. This is particularly interesting under 4G/5G and restrictive data plans, or when accessing places / servers with weak connection. It helps avoid having to wait for the “buffering” of the video content mid-playback.
But yes, I agree each iteration has diminishing returns, with a higher bump in requirements. I feel that’s a pattern we see often.
This! Also there’s AI upscaling, if good enough it could (in theory) make a 1080p video show with a 4k quality only very few lucky and healthy young people would be able to tell apart. In the meantime, my eyesight progressively gets worse with age.
God damn it, not again
