There's an HDR war brewing on TikTok and other social apps. A fraction of posts that use HDR are just massively brighter than the rest; the whole video shines like a flashlight. The apps are eventually going to have to detect HDR abuse.
Wow. To me, the big news here is that ~30% of devices now support AV1 hardware decoding. The article lists a bunch of examples of devices that have gained it in the past few years. I had no idea it was getting that popular -- fantastic news!
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?
I'm surprised AV1 usage is only at 30%. Is AV1 so demanding that Netflix clients without AV1 hardware acceleration capabilities would be overwhelmed by it?
On a related note, why are release groups not putting out AV1 WEB-DLs? Most 4K stuff is h265 now but if AV1 is supplied without re-encoding surely that would be better?
Netflix has been the worst performing and lowest quality video stream of any of the streaming services. Fuzzy video, lots of visual noise and artifacts. Just plan bad and this is on the 4k plan on 1GB fiber on a 4k Apple TV. I can literally tell when someone is watching Netflix without knowing because it looks like shit.
I understand that sometimes the HN titles get edited to be less descriptive and more generic in order to match the actual article title.
What’s the logic with changing the title here from the actual article title it was originally submitted with “AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming” to the generic and not at all representative title it currently has “AV1: a modern open codec”? That is neither the article title nor representative of the article content.
I had forgotten about the film-grain extraction, which is a clever approach to a huge problem for compression.
But... did I miss it, or was there no mention of any tool to specify grain parameters up front? If you're shooting "clean" digital footage and you decide in post that you want to add grain, how do you convey the grain parameters to the encoder?
It would degrade your work and defeat some of the purpose of this clever scheme if you had to add fake grain to your original footage, feed the grainy footage to the encoder to have it analyzed for its characteristics and stripped out (inevitably degrading real image details at least a bit), and then have the grain re-added on delivery.
So you need a way to specify grain characteristics to the encoder directly, so clean footage can be delivered without degradation and grain applied to it upon rendering at the client.
Actual film grain (i.e., photochemical) is arguably a valid source of information. You can frame it as noise, but does provide additional information content that our visual system can work with.
Removing real film grain from content and then recreating it parametrically on the other side is not the same thing as directly encoding it. You are killing a lot of information. It is really hard to quantify exactly how we perceive this sort of information so it's easy to evade the consequences of screwing with it. Selling the Netflix board on an extra X megabits/s per streamer to keep genuine film grain that only 1% of the customers will notice is a non-starter.
AV1 is not new anymore and I think most of the modern devices are supporting them natively. Some devices like Apple even have a dedicated AV1 HW-accelerator. Netflix has pushing AV1 for a while now so I thought that the adoption rate should be like 50%, but it seems like AV1 requires better hardware and newer software which a lot of people don't have.
> AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores¹ that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions. At the same time, AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC, resulting in 45% fewer buffering interruptions.
Just thought I'd extract the part I found interesting as a performance engineer.
Am I the only one that thought this is an old article by the title? AV1 is now 10 years old and AV2 has been announced for year-end release few months ago. If anything the news is that AV1 powers only 30% by now. At least HEVC, released about the same time, has gotten quite popular in warez scene (movies/TV/anime) for small encodes, whereas AV1 releases are still considered a rarity. (Though to be fair 30% Netflix & YT means AV1 usage in total is much higher.) Will've expected a royalty-free codec to've been embraced more but seems its difficulty for long time to be played on low power devices hindered its adoption.
> At Netflix, our top priority is delivering the best possible entertainment experience to our members.
I dont think that is true of any streamers. Otherwise they wouldnt provide the UI equivalent of a shopping centre that tries to get you lost and unable to find your way out.
I can't figure out an answer to why they'd do this. They're still supporting their custom Chromecast "receiver" app (for now?), which is a standard HTML app. But now they're detecting the Chromecast-capable device model, looking it up in an allowlist, then conditionally showing the device in the Netflix App's Cast UI.
This would mean if you have a new device and an old device in the same network the Netflix app might show only your old device! What?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what they've done here?
Weirdly, Netflix on my Samsung TV it's been a few months it's using only H264. Not AV1. When they first launched AV1, it worked there...
Honestly not complaining, because they were using AV1 with 800-900~kbps for 1080p content, which is clearly not enough compared to their 6Mbps h.264 bitrate.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] threadThe latest android release has a setting that is the HDR version of “volume leveling”.
Sounds like they set HEVC to higher quality then? Otherwise how could it be the same as AVC?
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?
Continous improvement ? CADT ? What shall the next one bring ? Free meals ?
What’s the logic with changing the title here from the actual article title it was originally submitted with “AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming” to the generic and not at all representative title it currently has “AV1: a modern open codec”? That is neither the article title nor representative of the article content.
But... did I miss it, or was there no mention of any tool to specify grain parameters up front? If you're shooting "clean" digital footage and you decide in post that you want to add grain, how do you convey the grain parameters to the encoder?
It would degrade your work and defeat some of the purpose of this clever scheme if you had to add fake grain to your original footage, feed the grainy footage to the encoder to have it analyzed for its characteristics and stripped out (inevitably degrading real image details at least a bit), and then have the grain re-added on delivery.
So you need a way to specify grain characteristics to the encoder directly, so clean footage can be delivered without degradation and grain applied to it upon rendering at the client.
Removing real film grain from content and then recreating it parametrically on the other side is not the same thing as directly encoding it. You are killing a lot of information. It is really hard to quantify exactly how we perceive this sort of information so it's easy to evade the consequences of screwing with it. Selling the Netflix board on an extra X megabits/s per streamer to keep genuine film grain that only 1% of the customers will notice is a non-starter.
Just thought I'd extract the part I found interesting as a performance engineer.
I dont think that is true of any streamers. Otherwise they wouldnt provide the UI equivalent of a shopping centre that tries to get you lost and unable to find your way out.
https://www.androidcentral.com/streaming-tv/chromecast/netfl...
This would mean if you have a new device and an old device in the same network the Netflix app might show only your old device! What?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what they've done here?
Honestly not complaining, because they were using AV1 with 800-900~kbps for 1080p content, which is clearly not enough compared to their 6Mbps h.264 bitrate.