I've been using a lot of H.265 (aka x265/HEVC); some pirate scene TV and movie releases come out in it. It's fantastic. About 1/3-1/4 the size of H.264, which makes a huge difference both with download and with archiving. The downside is that there's not a lot of hardware support for encoding or decoding. Doing it on the CPU isn't bad but definitely not as energy efficient.<p>The problem with H.265 is the IP situation is a mess. AV1 looks to be better in every way. Looking forward to its adoption. So far the pirate scene doesn't seem to be using it at all.
The thing I'm most excited about for AV1 is film grain synthesis. I can't articulate why, but I really love the look of film grain in video. Unfortunately, on most codecs, film grain is a huge hassle which takes up a lot of bandwidth. But AV1 can automatically remove the grain, encode, and add it back in.
Truncated graphs are really misleading; I ended up doing a double-take. There are more honest ways to compress the height of a graph if vertical space is at a premium, like showing %savings.
I've seen a few mentions of patents in this discussion. Does anyone know how close AV1 is to infringing on any patents or when we might find out? This is the most recent article I found - <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/AV1-Is-Finally-Here-but-Intellectual-Property-Questions-Remain-124134.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New...</a> and it seems that the market doesn't/didn't know enough to know if there are patent infringements.<p>Yet this article from Mozilla seems like that from June the situation might have changed now that a 1.0 stable spec is out. Given that inspection for infringement has been part of the codec creation process it seems promising that they will be safe. But patents have proven themselves to be funny things.<p>That said, have there been any updates since June from lawyers/other blogs/etc about the patent situation yet?
I think Mozilla should advocate for patents free Software or get rid of Software Patents completely.<p>The graph starts at 50%?<p>And they didn't mention in the Moscow State University test, AV1 was 300x to 1000x slower.<p>While I like competition from AV1, whatever they are doing in terms of marketing really doesn't resonate with me.
Last time I checked (very unscientific test using Handbrake) the AV1 encoder was something like 10x slower than the hevc encoder on the same system. Is this likely to improve?
How does AV1 performs when encoding fast (like realtime for twitch)? Is it possible? If yes, what is the gain over h264?<p>I really hope an open format will win "the war", but I can't see it work at scale if it doesn't support streaming.