Arif Dikici, who is a part of the Android Video and Image Codecs team at Google, recently announced on LinkedIn that Android will now use an AV1 decoder known as “libdav1d,” which was created by the team behind VLC.
Because they can’t use hardware decoding.
Which is fair, but AV1 isn’t new any more, and it’s pretty universally recognized as better.
Hardware decoding is the whole point. Hardware support is notorious for lagging greatly behind software. Desktop support is not great either right now. It makes you wonder what Google’s reason is, they have to be aware that must people won’t be able to use it properly.
I know hardware decoding is the point. But you can’t just wait until every phone on the planet supports it.
Their reason is that it’s a massively better format.
But you can’t just wait until every phone on the planet supports it.
The proper approach is simply to have the app check the hardware decode capabilities of the device and use the best option. Pretty sure that’s what YT has always done for codec transitions in the past.
Forcing AV1 on devices without hardware decode will end up making users think their battery is starting to wear out, even with the better software decoder’
…massively better for whom? I mean I understand if they start using it and offering it to devices that support it. But if they push something that needs software decoding when there are other formats that have hardware support it’s going to be a shit fest.
Right now AVC (H264) has hardware 4k support and HEVC (H265) has hardware 2k, while AV1 only has 1080p software. What’s the point of offering AV1 4k?
Massively better quality per byte.
You know, the sole purpose of a lossy video codec?
But the licensing is also far better for end consumers.
One one hand av1 has some great advantages and this will force some lagging OEMs to add hardware support
On the other hand snake ass google already split encoding into premium qualities, so they’re just gonna set the “free” bitrate so low it may as well be H264.
Reminder that all libaom versions are named after My Little Pony characters. Anytime you watch a video encoded in AV1 you are consuming My Little Pony content
I don’t know if this is meant as a warning, or a “ha, fuck you!”, or an attempt to spark outrage, or to make us all cozy inside.
I’ve never watched the shit so it’s hard for me to tell.
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Oh no…?
How can I test if my phone uses hardware decoding for AV1?
apps like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parseus.codecinfo (https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.parseus.codecinfo) show whether or not you’ve got it, on my samsung galaxy note 20 ultra I’ve got software only :(
Let me save you some time, it doesn’t. I have no idea what Google is thinking, very few phones have it right now.
Are they still using Mp3 for audio or have they switched to something more modern for that too?
They’ve been using opus for probably around a decade at this point, and in fact YouTube was a pretty early adopter of it and had a large role in popularizing it
AV1 has been quite disappointing compared to HEVC. Encoding and decoding is super heavy and hardware acceleration is very lacking.
