Quote:
Originally Posted by soresu
A lack of prevalent VP9 HW support didn't stop Google from pushing it for Youtube, and I doubt it will be any different for AV1.
Especially when there is already far better SW decoding for AV1 than VP9 had at the equivalent time from release, coupled with far more performant mobile CPU cores to decode it with - Apple aside the best ARM core at the time was A57 at around 2 Ghz, now we have X1 at around 2.84 Ghz which has to be more than 3x faster at least.
|
Yeah, in many ways AV1 is already more mature than any VPx implementation ever got to. There certainly are a lot more encoder vendors competing on making better looking and faster encoders, which is a huge deal.
SW DRM is simply not allowed for lots of premium content, however. AV1 is a lot more practical for user-generated and other non-commercial content than for professional licensed content.
Also, the reduced battery life of using a SW decoder matters a lot more when watching a two hour movie than short-form content.
Quote:
|
I imagine that Qualcomm didn't want to support VP9 either to begin with, but it eventually ended up in there as will AV1 in good time - whether that actually happens before AV2 is released is a different story.
|
AV2 is in pretty early stages. EVC and VVC are the next two standardized codecs that HW vendors are going to be deciding whether to put in.
Quote:
|
It's also worth noting that for all Qualcomm's market dominance elsewhere, China and India's market will probably be populated with many handsets that use Mediatek SoC's that do support AV1 - and their combined populations/potential market are not something to sniff at for sure.
|
Yeah, another divide between "Hollywood" content that is globally licensed and more regional content where DRM rules can be much more relaxed. A lot of those markets use ASOP not Google Android, and so might not include all the software decoders like AV1.
As a content creator, if one is choosing one codec beyond H.264, HEVC certainly offers a much bigger audience for 2021 except for Firefox and Chrome.