If May and June were F1 race cars in terms of speed of AV1 development, then July would probably be a Honda Civic. After numerous exciting announcements in the previous month, July felt like everyone’s on vacation, which is probably true because summer months tend to be slow as the school’s out. So, this update will be a short one as I’m out on vacation as well :)
Mile High Video 2019
Nathan Egge of Mozilla and Brion Vibber of Wikimedia presented a session recapping AV1’s progress in the last year. Here’s a recap of the most important parts of the presentation
- Live encode and playback demo in all major browsers (even Safari!) using the dav1d decoder. The Safari demo was done using a WebAssembly shim called
ogv.js
.ogv.js
includes a build of the dav1d AV1 decoder which works well enough in Safari at low resolutions currently. Once the WebAssembly threading and SIMD support matures, the higher resolutions should also become playable in browsers without native AV1 support - 4K decoding on an iPad Pro showing that it’s possible to decode a 4K AV1 file even in software!
- 1 in 8 videos played in Firefox in July 2019 were AV1!
AV1 live encode and playback demo at #mhv2019
AV1 in @firefox (ARM+x86), @googlechrome, @MicrosoftEdge, Safari and @videolan VLC, all using dav1d.
Encoded live with @intel SVT-AV1 in @DASH_IF (360p to 1080p) format. pic.twitter.com/pyrj2sXfYv- VideoLAN (@videolan) July 31, 2019
For the details of other demos shown, I’ve embedded the presentation below.
Kevin Staunton-Lambert of Switch Media posted his presentation about working with AV1. It has some useful info on how to use AV1 as well as why AV1 achieves better compression. The slides are embedded below.
Xilinx acquires NGCodec
libvips now supports compressing images in AVIF format
Read the rest of the story @ https://www.singhkays.com/blog/av1-ecosystem-update-july-2019/