AV1: One Giant Leap for Video-Kind

by Ethan

CODECs aren't exactly the most exciting thing.  But a new one, AV1, might actually change the way we watch videos, despite its relative obscurity, because it improves on its predecessors in pretty much every way.

The project itself is developed by the Alliance for Open Media (a.k.a., AOMedia), a non-profit with a Who's Who in the tech community: the biggies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Mozilla and Apple; chip manufacturers like ARM, AMD, Intel and Nvidia; and streaming providers like Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo, and the BBC, among others.  This means that, for possibly the first time ever, there could actually be a standard supported by pretty much every major tech company from the very get-go.

The format is open-source, and licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License, alongside an explicit patent-grant based on reciprocal license (basically, as long as you don't sue someone with your own patent over their use of AV1, you can use AV1 without worrying about being sued).  Plus, since a big part of the format's development was patent review, it won't face problems like the rocky roll-out of H.264, which, while now the most common video format on the Internet, was initially blocked from browsers like Firefox because of patent licensing issues.  The situation is even worse for H.265, which five years in still isn't widely supported by any tech company but Apple, in large part because it has three separate patent licensees.  (Side note: one of them asked for a percentage of streaming revenues, which was unanimously rebuffed.  As one CT put it, "No mainstream company is ever going to do that," which probably influenced the format's non-use.)

AVI is even more efficient than the last available free CODEC, VP9, by at least 30 percent.  When combined with the open audio format Opus , which is also the most efficient audio CODEC available, you can watch videos at the same quality while using 50 percent less data than H.264, according to Facebook's testing.  The implications of this development are pretty wide reaching: with so much more efficient delivery, 4K and 8K content streaming may actually be within reach for those with slower Internet; high-quality streaming will be possible over low-speed cellular networks; and, even for those with good Internet, everything will look better.

The only problem: the format is so complex it takes significantly longer to encode than any other format.  As in, depending on the video hundreds or thousands of times as long.  But since the big tech companies don't have lack of server power, and services like Netflix deliver so much content, it won't be an issue for them.  And besides, over time the encoder will improve in efficiency, meaning you could see AV1 become a standard for consumer use too.

You might be asking "When will I actually see this in use?"  The answer: pretty soon.  Since the final, validated specification of the format was only released in June 2018, there's still work to be done.  Yet, Google already supports AV1 in Chrome's newest versions, Mozilla promised Firefox support (beyond the Nightly version) in late 2018, and Netflix and YouTube already have test videos available, with at least Netflix intending to roll-out full support imminently.  So keep your eyes open.  Though there's still some work to be done, there 's a good chance that massive improvements are on their way.

Further Reading

See Facebook's testing at: AV1 Beats x264 and libvpx-vp9 in Practical Use Case

Bitmovin, a large video services company, also tested the format; its results and dataset are here: Best Video Codec: An Evaluation of AV1, AVC, HEVC and VP9

Check AOMedia's site for more info, like the bitstream spec, at aomedia.org