tl;dr AV1 is a new video encoding format which now has hardware acceleration through VA-API on Linux
AV1 is that new open source patent-free codec, right?
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So kind of like GPLv3 where you get a free license to the patent as long as you obey the license terms and carry out the responsibilities that it outlines?
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How does AV1 compare to something like h.265 and is it likely that the piracy scene will switch to something like AV1 in the future?
most of the pirating movie scene still uses hd, and av1 has barely more efficient bitrate at hd quality compared to h265, so the additional encoding time/worse hardware support isn’t worth it
what i am curious about is h266, which does offer about 30 % better bitrate efficiency at hd quailty compared to h265, but hardware support for h266 is practically non-existent, so overall i expect the movie piracy scene to stay on h265 for quite some time in the future
remember, most of the poorer world countries, which are countries where the majority of pirates are, have older hardware with worse codec support, which even furthers hinders transition to newer codecs, for example, a huge famous torrent tracker here in russia barely has any h265 (let alone av1) content, bc most people don’t have hardware that support h265 codec
Thank you for your comment.
It does cut a considerable chunk of size from a video, I’ve noticed Youtube uses AV1 in 8k more than anything. But so far only Google seems to have a decent way of converting videos to AV1 because ffmpeg is still way too slow to even consider.
Unless there’s a big leap in encoding time, I don’t see the piracy scene switching to AV1 in the next 5 years.
This is why I wish FPGAs were cheaper and more widely used in consumer hardware. Got a new codec? Just load up a hardware decoder for it!
Well, technically speaking consumer graphics hardware usually has hardware decoders. Just not by using FPGAs and usually not for AV1 (yet). And I think that @yeolsongarak@lemmy.ml was speaking of encoding anyway.
Regardless, using FPGAs for CODEC support sounds interesting (if possible).
I can see the forum posts in my head already “HALP I BRICKED MY FPGA, AND I THINK ITS MINING SHITCOIN WITHOUT MY PERMISSION”.
Though yeh, I’m interested in it too.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply
Hmm, does this mean video on raspberry Pi will become bearable?
Only if the raspberry pi has a hardware decoder for AV1, otherwise it’s stuck doing decoding video in CPU, which is not very efficient. It may make sense to keep things in x264/5 which has better general hardware support.
Oh, darn. Thanks for the response.
