The mystery is who is paying whom ? Is Microsoft paying for HEVC licences ? Google ? Distributor ? Silicon vendors ? All of them ? The question above is, "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?". Or, "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"
>Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster.
Most new hardware supports hardware decode for AV1 too. There were 1-2 generations prior to the current one that had HECV but not AV1, but that sample size will become irrelevant over time.
>People don't much.
Well, clearly people who make decisions do. If you ask an average person on the street if they care about HEVC or AV1, they don't. If you ask Netflix or Google, they do.
"Netflix has also partnered with YouTube to develop an open-source solution for an AV1 decoder on game consoles that utilizes the additional power of GPUs."
But still today you can take an HEVC iPhone or GoPro video and watch it on your PS5 with full hardware encoding. This open source solution doesn't help with that.
> It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.
I actually think the truth is the exact reverse. HEVC has easy-to-license patent pools. A couple of clicks and done.
The patent situation surrounding AV1 is complex. It claims to be a free format but multiple entities claim patents that cover it. A submarine patent lawsuit seems likely.
>The patent situation surrounding AV1 is complex. It claims to be a free format but multiple entities claim patents that cover it. A submarine patent lawsuit seems likely.
This can be said about anything. Sounds like FUD. There hasn't been a successful lawsuit yet, right ?
The Alliance for Open Source Media (the group behind AV1) is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the European Commission[1] who, per the article, appear to be threatening those who distribute software decoding with a fine of 10% of global revenue.
According to this article[2], Sisvel, the patent group claims its licensing for AV1 is
> more convenient than licensing from individual patent holders, which in this case include companies like Philips, GE, NTT, Ericsson, Dolby and Toshiba
So, yes there is FUD around AV1, but as FUD goes, it’s pretty legit considering the players and their “nationality ”.
Going to add that I don’t have any knowledge of the legitimacy of the patents involved, and think the legitimacy of software patents generally is often questionable.
Previous codes have been designed and sold as patented codecs. AV1 is meant to be royalty free by design. The claimants of the alleged patents can ask for money, but eventually somebody will refuse due to the very explicit royalty-free promise in AV1, and there should be a lawsuit. We have not seen that yet. As a practical matter, even if people are paying money silently, it would get on the grapevine. We haven't even seen any evidence of that either.
A submarine patent approach implies waiting for it to become popular enough that you can extort companies into paying, rather than just dropping the codec in lieu of something else.
Submarine patent lawsuits have the same probability for both of them. But guaranteed patent leeching applies only to HEVC. So HEVC has only downsides, no upsides in comparison.
> Submarine patent lawsuits have the same probability for both of them.
Frankly, I don't believe this, if only because HEVC has been around for much longer, and if this was going to happen, it already would have.
The patent pool situation is a little messy, as there are two possible pools, but given how ubiquitous the codec is now, most companies seem to be figuring it out.
You can't prove the opposite anyway. Whole "submarine patent" thing is just a speculative fear. You can't quantify it. So it applies to both in case someone has paranoia. But as above, in case of HEVC it's complemented with guaranteed protection racket fees for the likes of MPEG-LA. So HEVC is worse in the end.
If you've paid for HEVC you can say 'hey, I tried to do the right thing'. If you don't pay for AV1 it looks like you were trying to avoid doing the right thing.
That sounds like "if you paid your racketeer, you can expect you'll be OK". However tomorrow you can get an additional racketeer to the first and both will demand payment then. First won't care to protect you from the second. Unlike mob protection racket they aren't exclusive.
The right thing here is use something that doesn't have a default protection racket attached.
Compared to HEVC, AV1 is still relatively new hence it suffers limited hardware support. Again it is key to note that Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and most hardware manufacturers already had support for the incumbent HEVC. That means that a hardware accelerated encoder can run HEVC 5x faster than AV1.
And…
A vast majority of devices in the market; phones, TVs, tablets, cameras, browsers, professional-grade applications, etc come with a built-in ability to decode HEVC. Even those coming from the founding fathers of the AV1 codec have added support for HEVC.
Most older hardware has HEVC decoding but only the last few gens have AV1. My 10980XE is like 96% occupied while watching AV1 without HW acceleration so many smaller devices can't do anything resembling a smooth playback.
> My 10980XE is like 96% occupied while watching AV1 without HW acceleration
That seems high. What resolution and frame rate is the video? And which decoder are you using? dav1d is a highly optimized software decoder so that's the one to try:
I tried it on some 8K HDR test video on YouTube on Linux/Firefox... All 18 cores and 36 threads at ~96%. NUC with an older Atom (7PJYH) gave like 0.1fps...
Which video and when did you try it? dav1d has improved a lot over time. You should try it again. You should also try any other AV1 video on YouTube. There's a lot of it there these days.
>My 10980XE is like 96% occupied while watching AV1 without HW acceleration
That shouldn't be the case. I play AV1 (via dav1d, software) w/o issue on much weaker CPUs than that (a zen1 laptop cpu and a haswell i7). The CPU is mostly idle.
It's hard to see HEVC as anything else than a legal liability.