It’s been an exciting time following the progress of the royalty free video codec AV1 over the past year and April might just be the most exciting active month in the amount of news we got about AV1! It’s not every day that media industry giants such as Netflix, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, ARM, Facebook, Nvidia, Intel, Cisco and many others agree on the same technology stack!
Samsung joins the party
Intel and Netflix are joining forces
At NAB 2019, Netflix announced they had selected Intel’s SVT-AV1 encoder for their workflow.
Although surprising at first, given the gulf in visual quality between the aomenc encoder vs the SVT-AV1 encoder at the moment, Netflix posted a techblog few days later explaining the rationale.
At Netflix, we believe that the AV1 ecosystem would benefit from an alternative clean and efficient open-source encoder implementation. There exists at least one other alternative open-source AV1 encoder, rav1e. However, rav1e is written in Rust programming language, whereas an encoder written in C has a much broader base of potential developers. The open-source encoder should also enable easy experimentation and a platform for testing new coding tools. Consequently, our requirements to the AV1 software are as follows:
- Easy to understand code with a low entry barrier and a test framework
- Competitive compression efficiency on par with the reference implementation
- Complete toolset and a decoder implementation sharing common code with the encoder, which simplifies experiments on new coding tools
- Decreased encoder runtime that enables quicker turn-around when testing new ideas
MSU Codec Comparison 2018
Mozilla’s NAB 2019 presentation
dav1d 0.3.0 release
AVIF POC and libraries
Read the rest of the story @ https://www.singhkays.com/blog/av1-ecosystem-update-april-2019/
