> To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding

Where did it say that?

> AV1 powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing

Is admittedly a bit non-specific, it could be interpreted as 30% of users or 30% of hours-of-video-streamed, which are very different metrics. If 5% of your users are using AV1, but that 5% watches far above the average, you can have a minority userbase with an outsized representation in hours viewed.

I'm not saying that's the case, just giving an example of how it doesn't necessarily translate to 30% of devices using Netflix supporting AV1.

Also, the blog post identifies that there is an effective/efficient software decoder, which allows people without hardware acceleration to still view AV1 media in some cases (the case they defined was Android based phones). So that kinda complicates what "X% of devices support AV1 playback," as it doesn't necessarily mean they have hardware decoding.

> So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support, I wonder what will be the next one?

Hopefully AV2.

That's not at all how I read it.

They mentioned they delivered a software decoder on android first, then they also targeted web browsers (presumably through wasm). So out of these 30%, a good chunk of it is software not hardware.

That being said, it's a pretty compelling argument for phone and tv manufacturers to get their act together, as Apple has already done.

I'm not too surprised. It's similar to the metric that "XX% of Internet is on IPv6" -- it's almost entirely driven by mobile devices, specifically phones. As soon as both mainstream Android and iPhones support it, the adoption of AV1 should be very 'easy'.

(And yes, even for something like Netflix lots of people consume it with phones.)

how does that mean "~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware encoding"? I'm guessing you meant hardware decoding???

Not trolling, but I'd bet something that's augmented with generative AI. Not to the level of describing scenes with words, but context-aware interpolation.

I mean... I bought a Samsung TV in 2020, and it already supported AV1 HW decoding.

2020 feels close, but that's 5 years.

>So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support

That'd be h264 (associated patents expired in most of the world), vp9 and av1.

h265 aka HEVC is less common due to dodgy, abusive licensing. Some vendors even disable it with drivers despite hardware support because it is nothing but legal trouble.

Why does it matter if Netflix is using an open standard if every video they stream is wrapped in proprietary closed DRM?

You just add it to your original footage, and accept whatever quality degradation that grain inherently provides.

Any movie or TV show is ultimately going to be streamed in lots of different formats. And when grain is added, it's often on a per-shot basis, not uniformly. E.g. flashback scenes will have more grain. Or darker scenes will have more grain added to emulate film.

Trying to tie it to the particular codec would be a crazy headache. For a solo project it could be doable but I can't ever imagine a streamer building a source material pipeline that would handle that.

The whole HDR scene still feels like a mess.

I know how bad the support for HDR is on computers (particularly Windows and cheap monitors), so I avoid consuming HDR content on them.

But I just purchased a new iPhone 17 Pro, and I was very surprised at how these HDR videos on social media still look like shit on apps like Instagram.

And even worse, the HDR video I shoot with my iPhone looks like shit even when playing it back on the same phone! After a few trials I had to just turn it off in the Camera app.

This is one of the reasons I don't like HDR support "by default".

HDR is meant to be so much more intense, it should really be limited to things like immersive full-screen long-form-ish content. It's for movies, TV shows, etc.

It's not what I want for non-immersive videos you scroll through, ads, etc. I'd be happy if it were disabled by the OS whenever not in full screen mode. Unless you're building a video editor or something.

Just what we need, a new loudness war, but for our eyeballs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Sounds like they need something akin to audio volume normalization but for video. You can go bright, but only in moderation, otherwise your whole video gets dimmed down until the average is reasonable.

My phone has this cool feature where it doesn't support HDR.

That's true on the web, as well; HDR images on web pages have this problem.

It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR". But you could probably catch the most egregious cases, like "every single pixel in the video has brightness above 80%".

HDR has a slight purpose, but the way it was rolled out was so disrespectful that I just want it permanently gone everywhere. Even the rare times it's used in a non-abusive way, it can hurt your eyes or make things display weirdly.

sounds like every fad that came before it where it was over used by all of the people copying with no understanding of what it is or why. remember all of the HDR still images that pushed everything to look post-apocalyptic? remember all of the people pushing washed out videos because they didn't know how to grade the images recorded in log and it became a "thing"?

eventually, it'll wear itself out just like every other over use of the new

Can someone explain what the war is about?

Like HDR abuse makes it sound bad, because the video is bright? Wouldn't that just hurt the person posting it since I'd skip over a bright video?

Sorry if I'm phrasing this all wrong, don't really use TikTok

I would love to know who the hell thought adding "brighter than white" range to HDR was a good idea. Or, even worse, who the hell at Apple thought implementing that should happen by way of locking UI to the standard range. Even if you have a properly mastered HDR video (or image), and you've got your brightness set to where it doesn't hurt to look at, it still makes all the UI surrounding that image look grey. If I'm only supposed to watch HDR in fullscreen, where there's no surrounding UI, then maybe you should tone-map to SDR until I fullscreen the damn video?

HDR videos on social media look terrible because the UI isn’t in HDR while the video isn’t. So you have this insanely bright video that more or less ignores your brightness settings, and then dim icons on top of it that almost look incomplete or fuzzy cause of their surroundings. It looks bizarre and terrible.

It's not AV1's fault though, I'm pretty sure it's that they cheap out on the bitrate. Apple is among the highest bitrates (other than Sony's weird hardware locked streaming service).

I actually blamed AV1 for the macro-blocking and generally awful experience of watching horror films on Netflix for a long time. Then I realized other sources using AV1 were better.

If you press ctl-alt-shift-d while the video is playing you'll note that most of the time that the bitrate is appallingly low, and also that Netflix plays their own original content using higher bitrate HEVC rather than AV1.

That's because they actually want it to look good. For partner content they often default back to lower bitrate AV1, because they just don't care.

This is actually their DRM speaking. If you watch it on a Linux device or basically anything that isn’t a smart TV on the latest OS, they limit you to a 720p low bitrate stream, even if you pay for 4k. (See Louis Rossman’s video on the topic)

Yep, and they also silently downgrade resolution and audio channels on an ever changing and hidden list of browsers/OS/device overtime.

Meanwhile pirated movies are in Blu-ray quality, with all audio and language options you can dream of.

I also find Netflix video quality shockingly bad and oddly inconsistent. I think they just don’t prioritize video quality in the same way as say apple or Disney does.

I cancelled Netflix for this exact reason. 4K Netflix looks worse than 720 YouTube, yet I pay(paid) for Netflix 4K, and at roughly 2x what I paid for Netflix when it launched. It's genuinely a disgrace how they can even claim with a straight face that you're actually watching 4K. The last price rise was the tipping point and I tapped out after 11 years.

Netflix on Apple TV has an issue if "Match Content" is "off" where it will constantly downgrade the video stream to a lower bitrate unnecessarily.

Even fixing that issue the video quality is never great compared to other services.

Probably some function of your location to data centers. I find hbo max to be aysmal these days. But I've learned to just stop caring about this stuff since no one else in my life does

Oddly enough, I observe something to the opposite effect.

I wonder if it has more to do with proximity to edge delivery nodes than anything else.

Thanks to libdav1d's [1] lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration, but basically yes: From Snapdragon 8 onwards, Google Tensor G3 onwards, NVIDIA RTX 3000 series onwards. All relatively new .

[1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

There are a lot of 10 year old TVs/fire sticks still in use that have a CPU that maxes out running the UI and rely exclusively on hardware decoding for all codecs (e.g. they couldn't hardware decode h264 either). Image a super budget phone from ~2012 and you'll have some idea the hardware capability we're dealing with.

I'd love to watch Netflix AV1 streams but they just straight up don't serve it to my smart TV or my Windows computers despite hardware acceleration support.

The only way I can get them to serve me an AV1 stream is if I block "protected content IDs" through browser site settings. Otherwise they're giving me an H.264 stream... It's really silly, to say the least

Compression gains will mostly be for the benefit of the streaming platform’s bills/infra unless you’re trying to stream 4K 60fps on hotel wifi (or if you can’t decode last-gen codecs on hardware either ). Apparently streaming platforms still favor user experience enough to not heat their rooms for no observable improvement. Also a TV CPU can barely decode a PNG still in software - video decoding of any kind is simply impossible.

If you are on a mobile device, decoding without hardware assistance might not overwhelm the processors directly, but it might drain your battery unnecessarily fast?

tv manufacturers don't want high end chips for their tv sets... hardware decoding is just a way to make cheaper chips for tvs.

They would be served h.265

I doubt that. Netflix has an app on TVs as old as 8-10 years now. SoCs in such TVs aren't enough to decode AV1. They're stuck with H.264 for a long time.

There are other possible explanations, e.g. AVC and HEVC are set to the same bitrate, so AVC streams lose quality, while AV1 targets HEVC's quality. Or they compare AV1 traffic to the sum of all mixed H.26x traffic. Or the rates vary in more complex ways and that's an (over)simplified summary for the purpose of the post.

Netflix developed VMAF, so they're definitely aware of the complexity of matching quality across codecs and bitrates.

definitely reads like "you're holding it wrong" to me as well

Dont forget that people also view Netflix on TV’s, and a large number of physical TV’s were made before AV1 was specced. So 30% overall may also mean 70% on modern devices.

I looked into this before, and the short answer is that release groups would be allowed to release in AV1, but the market seems to prefer H264 and H265 because of compatibility and release speed. Encoding AV1 to an archival quality takes too long, reduces playback compatibility, and doesn't save that much space.

There also are no scene rules for AV1, only for H265 [1]

[1] https://scenerules.org/html/2020_X265.html

Smaller PT sites usually allow it

Bigger PT sites with strict rules do not allow it yet and are actively discussing/debating it.Netflix Web-DLs being AV1 is definitely pushing that. The codec has to be a select-able option during upload.

Player compatibility. Netflix can use AV1 and send it to the devices that support it while sending H265 to those that don't. A release group puts out AV1 and a good chunk of users start avoiding their releases because they can't figure out why it doesn't play (or plays poorly).

I'm not in the scene anymore, but for my own personal encoding, at higher quality settings, AV1 (rav1e or SVT; AOM was crazy slow) doesn't significantly beat out x265 for most sources.

FGS makes a huge difference at moderately high bitrates for movies that are very grainy, but many people seem to really not want it for HQ sources (see sibling comments). With FGS off, it's hard to find any sources that benefit at bitrates that you will torrent rather than stream.

h.264 has near-universal device support and almost no playback issues at the expensive of slightly larger file sizes. h.265 and av1 give you 10-bit 4K but playback on even modest laptops can become choppy or produce render artifacts. I tried all three, desperately wanting av1 to win but Jellyfin on a small streaming server just couldn't keep up.

I've seen some on private sites. My guess is they are not popular enough yet. Or pirates are using specific hardware to bypass Widevine encryption (like an Nvidia Shield and burning keys periodically) that doesn't easily get the AV1 streams.

I'm seeing releases pop up on Pirate Bay with AV1 this year.

Because pirates are unaffected by the patent situation with H.265.

Or compression that makes a streamed 4K video look worse than a 1080p video played locally.

OK guys, my screwup.

We generally try to remove numbers from titles, because numbers tend to make a title more baity than it would otherwise be, and quite often (e.g., when reporting benchmark test results) a number is cherry-picked or dialed up for maximum baitiness. In this case, the number isn't exaggerated, but any number tends to grab the eye more than words, so it's just our convention to remove number-based titles where we can.

The thing with this title is that the number isn't primarily what the article is about, and in fact it under-sells what the article really is, which is a quite-interesting narrative of Netflix's journey from H.264/AVC, to the initial adoption of AV1 on Android in 2020, to where it is now: 30% adoption across the board.

When we assess that an article's original title is baity or misleading, we try to find a subtitle or a verbatim sentence in the article that is sufficiently representative of the content.

The title I chose is a subtitle, but I didn't take enough care to ensure it was adequately representative. I've now chosen a different subtitle which I do think is the most accurate representation of what the whole article is about.

Though in the original title AV1 could be anything if you don't know it's a codec. How about:

"AV1 open video codec now powers 30% of Netflix viewing, adds HDR10+ and film grain synthesis"

Amen. The mania for obscurity in titles here is infuriating. This one is actually replete with information compared to many you see on the front page.

It is usually Dang using his judgment.

For me that’s a FU moment that reminds me ‘TF am I doing here?’ I genuinely see this resource as a censoring plus advertising (both for YC, obviously) platform, where there are generic things, but also things someone doesn’t want you to read or know. The titles are constantly being changed to gibberish like right here, the adequate comments or posts are being dead, yet the absolutely irrelevant or offensive things, can stay not touched. Etc.

Also, it’s not the whole picture. AV1 is open because it didn’t have the good stuff (newly patented things) and as such I also wouldn’t say it’s the most modern.

IIRC, there's a time/recency factor. If we assume that most people don't browse /newest (without commenting on should, I suspect this is true), then that seems like a reasonable way to help surface things; enough upvotes to indicate interest means a story gets a chance at the front page.