Wanted: More AV1 hardware support

On the one hand, AV1 has seen strong progress in software decoders, such as browsers, but hardware support has been severely lacking. This is not an AV1 specific problem, being one that has plagued other codecs in their early lifecycles, but the heavyweight backing the codec enjoys from many of the world’s largest technology companies means that the availability of dedicated hardware remains something of a source of frustration for AOMedia members.

To be sure, progress has been made since last year. There are hardware decoders out there, including Mediatek with a smartphone SoC, Broadcom and Realtek with set-top box SOCs and Nvidia, which has announced hardware decoding in its GPU.

On the smartphone and television front, Oppo and Vivo have some AV1 support, while the latest Samsung and LG smart TV models come with AV1.

Intel has dedicated hardware acceleration to perform AV1 decode, recently announcing it has a hardware-based AV1 decoder in upcoming XeLp products.

Other products are expected shortly from the CE ecosystem, according to Jill Boyce of Intel, who moderated the IBC Showcase panel on the topic.

Like Intel, AOMedia members and panellist Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and Tencent outlined their product and service roadmaps for AV1 while at the same time tackling some familiar questions regarding the royalty-free codec.

“Amazon believes that AV1 is a key technology in the 5G area, that is going to bring new user experiences to our customer an our community” said engineer Yoshi, which showed a gaming content demo for Twitch during the webinar and for which more details will be published soon. Twitch as a content platform is looking at streaming AV1 to its gaming community in the near future, according to Yueshi Shen, who works for Amazon AWS and Twitch.

Shen explained that Amazon is working with software vendors and SoC suppliers to accelerate penetration rates of AV1 decoder support.

“This we believe is a key factor that determines the commercial success of AV1 and that will make AV1 a viable codec format that can replace H.264 in the future,” Shen said.

“Amazon in particular is paying attention to the low, less than $300 mobile devices, we believe this is the most important client platform for video consumption in the 5G era,” he said.

On the encoder front, AWS launched in march 2020 AV1 in MediaConvert, its cloud VOD media transcoder. AWS is also looking to offer AV1 in its turnkey streaming solution to connect both encoding and decoding.

“As a community we want to move to a next generation codec otherwise the $200 and $300 devices we want to build will just keep getting more expensive because of silicon costs,” added Matt Frost of Google.

David Ronca of Facebook noted AOMedia members running a large scale decode test for a range of mobile phones in order to gain an understanding into the level of performance of devices as they roll out AV1. Hundreds of Android devices will be tested to determine the capabilities and opportunities. (There are still no Apple enabled devices despite the company joining AOMedia as a member.)

Google, for its part, has been using AV1 for several years, starting with YouTube in H2 2018. Since then it has encoded over 40 million pieces of content into AV1 (and streaming a billion VP9 and AV1 videos a day). Using it from the lowest resolutions to 8K content in the most recent Samsung and LG TVs.

Earlier this year, AV1 was tested in the Google Duo video conference app with favourable results, according to Frost.

“We are currently using AV1 to great effect in Indonesia, India and other markets,” Frost said. “We are looking forward to introducing it into a whole range of Google’s video applications and services,”

AV1 has been introduced in Chrome and Android, including Android set-top boxes from third-party manufacturers like Technicolor.

Netflix has been streaming AV1 since February 2020. Currently it supports AV1 on Android devices, using a software decoder 9th...

On the one hand, AV1 has seen strong progress in software decoders, such as browsers, but hardware support has been severely lacking. This is not an AV1 specific problem, being one that has plagued other codecs in their early lifecycles, but the heavyweight backing the codec enjoys from many of the world’s largest technology companies means that the availability of dedicated hardware remains something of a source of frustration for AOMedia members.

To be sure, progress has been made since last year. There are hardware decoders out there, including Mediatek with a smartphone SoC, Broadcom and Realtek with set-top box SOCs and Nvidia, which has announced hardware decoding in its GPU.

On the smartphone and television front, Oppo and Vivo have some AV1 support, while the latest Samsung and LG smart TV models come with AV1.

Intel has dedicated hardware acceleration to perform AV1 decode, recently announcing it has a hardware-based AV1 decoder in upcoming XeLp products.

Other products are expected shortly from the CE ecosystem, according to Jill Boyce of Intel, who moderated the IBC Showcase panel on the topic.

Like Intel, AOMedia members and panellist Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and Tencent outlined their product and service roadmaps for AV1 while at the same time tackling some familiar questions regarding the royalty-free codec.

“Amazon believes that AV1 is a key technology in the 5G area, that is going to bring new user experiences to our customer an our community” said engineer Yoshi, which showed a gaming content demo for Twitch during the webinar and for which more details will be published soon. Twitch as a content platform is looking at streaming AV1 to its gaming community in the near future, according to Yueshi Shen, who works for Amazon AWS and Twitch.

Shen explained that Amazon is working with software vendors and SoC suppliers to accelerate penetration rates of AV1 decoder support.

“This we believe is a key factor that determines the commercial success of AV1 and that will make AV1 a viable codec format that can replace H.264 in the future,” Shen said.

“Amazon in particular is paying attention to the low, less than $300 mobile devices, we believe this is the most important client platform for video consumption in the 5G era,” he said.

On the encoder front, AWS launched in march 2020 AV1 in MediaConvert, its cloud VOD media transcoder. AWS is also looking to offer AV1 in its turnkey streaming solution to connect both encoding and decoding.

“As a community we want to move to a next generation codec otherwise the $200 and $300 devices we want to build will just keep getting more expensive because of silicon costs,” added Matt Frost of Google.

David Ronca of Facebook noted AOMedia members running a large scale decode test for a range of mobile phones in order to gain an understanding into the level of performance of devices as they roll out AV1. Hundreds of Android devices will be tested to determine the capabilities and opportunities. (There are still no Apple enabled devices despite the company joining AOMedia as a member.)

Google, for its part, has been using AV1 for several years, starting with YouTube in H2 2018. Since then it has encoded over 40 million pieces of content into AV1 (and streaming a billion VP9 and AV1 videos a day). Using it from the lowest resolutions to 8K content in the most recent Samsung and LG TVs.

Earlier this year, AV1 was tested in the Google Duo video conference app with favourable results, according to Frost.

“We are currently using AV1 to great effect in Indonesia, India and other markets,” Frost said. “We are looking forward to introducing it into a whole range of Google’s video applications and services,”

AV1 has been introduced in Chrome and Android, including Android set-top boxes from third-party manufacturers like Technicolor.

Netflix has been streaming AV1 since February 2020. Currently it supports AV1 on Android devices, using a software decoder 9th...