Dav1d - the fastest AV1 decoder now in Firefox by default.
Introduction from Voximplant
Yes, we are not the first to write about AV1 - we already had a translation about Chrome 70 with codec support , and here we are sharing the news again. This time - the word Nathan Egge, a senior engineer of Mozilla and a member of the fund Xiph.org, who was pleased with the news about the default support for AV1. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this codec for modern streaming services, as well as for real-time audio / video applications. Why dav1d, how it differs from the first AV1 decoder, some graphs from benchmarks and a forecast for the future - briefly and to the point, I ask for cat.
The release of Firefox 67 improved performance to such an extent that the 67th version became the fastest of all previous ones. Among the improvements is the free AV1 – dav1d decoder, which is now enabled by default on all desktop platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux) for 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
With files that are 30% smaller than the most popular VP9 web codec and almost 50% smaller than the files of its predecessor, H.264 , the AV1 codec gives better quality with less network load and can also potentially change as where we watch videos on the Internet.
Nevertheless, since AV1 is a new and more complex codec, some experts predicted that its distribution in the market will wait until 2020, when high-performance decoders are expected. Dav1d’s built-in browser refutes these predictions.
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Supported by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) , dav1d is a collaboration of the French non-commercial VideoLAN and the open-source FFmpeg community (by the way, FFmpeg has somehow done a decoder that is faster than the original, it was FFvp9 for VP9 - translator comment) . The best minds of the multimedia open source joined forces to release the first version of dav1d last fall, which was 2-5 times faster than libaom , the AOM decoder, which was part of the AV1 standard.
Since then, developers have squeezed even more performance out of dav1d by categorizing and rewriting critical sections in a highly parallelized SIMD build. And it can be seen in the benchmarks:
Higher performance and efficiency mean smooth playback of AV1-video in the browser with a noticeable decrease in the load on the CPU.
AV1 is already being used on the web.
The appearance of dav1d in Firefox happened more than ever in time. In recent months alone, we have noted a significant increase in the use of AV1; According to our data, in April, 11.8% of videos in Firefox Beta were played using AV1, while in March this figure was around 3%, and in February - 0.85%.
Given that dav1d is built into the desktop Firefox, we expect even more websites to use the next-generation free codec, AV1.
Mozilla invests in the future of AV1
Modern decoders like dav1d are great for playing videos, but good, free and open-source encoders are also very important for the AV1 community. The AOM source coder was designed to form the AV1 standard, not to make a coder for production. Therefore, Mozilla and Xiph.Org jointly develop a “sterile” rav1e encoder (Rust AV1 Encoder), so that it has advantages over the original encoder and to allow fast enough software coding for real-time applications (for example, WebRTC applications).
Good coders rely on psycho-visual models to extract bits for what human perception values ​​as “good quality” (not PSNR ). With rav1e, we apply perceptual analysis competencies from our early designs - Daala and Theora - to add activity masking , a better color balance , improved control of transmission speed and perceptual distortion metrics like CDEF . All this will lead to a new level of quality AV1-coding.
We also make significant efforts to increase the speed of encoding, using techniques that first appear only in AV1. It is not enough just to rewrite the existing code of the source coder in the SIMD assembly and make it 4 times faster. Rav1e offers ways to make AV1-encoding 1000 (thousand) times faster using new algorithms, rather than optimizing the existing code.
Rav1e is constantly getting better and better. Active development will continue at a high pace to roll out major changes weekly.
Links
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/456072/
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