Qualcomm Snapdragon to support AV1 in 2023

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/report-qualcomm-will-support-av1-video-codec-in-2023/


Maybe Apple has ties to MPEG so they're going to hold off on AV1 support as long as they can. Could Hollywood prefer H.265 because of royalties?

Apple makes money from iTunes store sales of movies and TV shows, not to mention the studios it works with to acquire content for their streaming service.

 

Yes please, more AV1, less H.265 kthx. The global media hegemony doesn't need more royalties paid.

 

Nah.

My laptop doesn't support AV1 HW decode. I don't want to have less battery life while watching YouTube for no reason.

 

Youtube has supported H.264 for over a decade. VP9 will probably be around for awhile too. Don't fret.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhanced-h264ify/

 

Wait, why do you think AV1 HW decode would decrease your battery life? If you're using AV1 today without hardware decode for it, then moving to dedicated decompressor hardware would extend your battery life, not shorten it.

Why do you think dedicated hardware would shorten battery life?

 

Because my laptop does not have HW decode for AV1, as I have said.

Of course dedicated hardware would increase battery life while watching AV1 significantly, but again, my laptop does not have HW decode for AV1.

Yeah I had to use that addon when VP9 was still new, on my old haswell based laptop.

If AV1 ever happens to replace VP9, I hope there will be a similar addon that forces VP9 instead of AV1.

It would suck for the countless mobile devices that still have no AV1 decode, especially the newer Snapdragon Gen 1 phones. If VP9 gets replaced by AV1, there will be significantly higher battery drain on these still pretty new devices and there would be nothing you could do.

 

Weird that Apple holds out on AV1.

 

Ah, I misunderstood what you were conveying. I get it now.

Well, it's not going to change overnight -- at least partially because AV1 decode hardware isn't prevalent just yet. If you recall, all prior video codecs which are currently hardware accelerated were, at some point in the past, not hardware accelerated and required more CPU power and software overhead. As you already know, those more modern, more capable video codecs moved from software to hardware and became ubiquitous.

So the move to AV1 might very well still impact legacy devices at some point, probably around the time that AV1 hardware decode exists in a far higher percentage of the hardware in people's hands. I wouldn't get too twisted up about it.

 

YouTube is already pushing some AV1 videos. It seems to be fairly common with highly popular vids. And that plugin does allow you to disable AV1 on YouTube so it will use VP9 and H.264 instead. That's why it's called Enhanced H.264ify

 

Have they started pushing AV1 even for lower resolutions? I thought getting meaningful bitrate (at already low bit rates) savings on AV1 over VP9 at 1080p and lower is somewhat problematic from a quality perspective. Doing a quick search it seems people do report youtube 1080p AV1 encodes being more "blocky" than VP9.

 

We can assume that the iphone 14 will have av1 right?

 

Apple's been in AOMedia since 2018 which suggests that have some interest in AV1. But just throwing this out there Apple did kind of go against the grain with audio and iTunes as a product differentiator. I'd wonder especially with their streaming service now whether they might be (or have been) at least thinking about doing the same for audio.

There was speculation that Qualcomm and Samsung would be the AV1 holdouts in order to push EVC.