Future of AV-1?

[Selur]

Haven't heard anything new about AV-1 development in a while (aside from minor bug fixes), so I'm wondering what do you think will happen with AV-1?
Seeing that there doesn't seem to be much updates around AV-1 (SVT-AV1 and rav1e) I was wondering what will happen to it?
Do you think there are real speed improvements on it's way?
Will hardware encoders for AV-1 come and will they may be help with it's success? (if they come to the consumer market)
Or will AV-1 not really make it to the consumer ? (aside from that streaming services might use it)

Cu Selur

[Mr_khyron]

Intel's new graphics card will have AV1 hardware encoder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84IV8VmQoY4&t=607s

[Selur]

Sounds nice, hopefully those cards are stand-alone and will work with AMD systems.
So something to look forward to next year,..
Nice.

Cu Selur

[butterw]

AV1 could become common for web videos once most new devices can decode it (next year ?). This should be possible on current hardware with optimized software decoders. Hardware decoders (the more power efficient solution) are not expected to be widely available in Android/mobile devices for quite some time.

Even if it succeeds on the web, this does not guarantee AV1 popularity for home encoding (VP9 is barely used outside of youtube): x264 and hevc are well established and AV1 will have to contend with the next generation of Mpeg codecs, and probably also AV2 if adoption is slow...

[sophisticles]

The latest build of ffmpeg supports SVT-AV1 right out of the box:

https://www.ffmpeg.org/

Prior to this it was possible to build ffmpeg with SVT-AV1 support but it required patches and it was flaky, now you can build an SVT-AV1 enabled copy of ffmpeg with a simply ./configure.

I don't think AV1 is going anywhere, it will be embraced and promoted by AMD, Intel, Nvidia, if for nothing else than to justify consumers buying newer and faster computers.

If we stuck with h264, modern computers are fast enough to handle it just fine, but with hevc slower computers struggle and with AV1 even top tier computers have trouble with it, sans acceleration.

AV1 is great for the computer industry, it keeps us needing to buy faster and faster hardware. And when mid-range computers become fast enough to handle AV1 just fine, AV2 will come out, possible AV3 and rinse, repeat.

I wonder if at some point in my lifetime I will see us reach a limit, where we just can't compress video anymore and still maintain the same apparent visual quality, where we have 14k displays and 14k video and processors capable of decoding and encoding this in real time?

I know I can play back 12k RAW video, scaled down to 1080p with an i5 Ice Lake laptop.

[sophisticles]

By the way, I just watched that video that was linked above, they claim that the Intel Xe encodes 4k HEVC to AV1 at 206 fps while the RTX 3080 Ampere does the same thing at 1.7 fps.

The problem is that according to Nvidia none of their cards is capable of hardware AV1 encoding, only decoding:

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new

https://www.techpowerup.com/273420/nvidia-updates-video-encode-and-decode-matrix-with-...to-ampere-gpus

So they may have tested the Intel Xe against a software based encoder running on a system that had an Ampere in it.

[butterw]

Youtube encoding is done with a custom hardware encoder.

Google VCU v2 supports AV1:
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-supercharges-youtube-with-a-custom-video-chip/