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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to AV1 to become the standard, but as far as I've seen, it's just not implemented anywhere, and the spec wasn't 100% final. I was messing with ffmpeg a couple months ago, and it didn't look like a straightforward option to convert either. I'd say it's not quite time we replace GIFs with it.

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It's implemented nearly everywhere (firefox, ffmpeg, edge, chrome, opera, vlc,...) and the spec is 100% final. Problem is that (and now the everywhere gets weak) android didn't implement it yet (afaik) and some packaged versions of the software haven't got it enabled or are just out of date.

What we can get from the article thought is: why isn't gif replaced by webm/vp9 yet? Can be encoded in no time and is actually supported everywhere.

> why isn't gif replaced by webm/vp9 yet?

Apple has significant market penetration, and you can't get VP9 to easily work in safari/iOS/tvOS

But why is this tolerated, for lack of a better word? There's no barrier to adding support, a decoder ships with ffmpeg. Youtube has been serving webm/vp9 video for years, so does that mean VP9 Youtube is unavailable on Apple platforms?

> Youtube has been serving webm/vp9 video for years, so does that mean VP9 Youtube is unavailable on Apple platforms?

Youtube serves h.264 to Apple platforms.

Well not if users force VP9 using something like youtube-dl and pipe to a compatible player. But I looked it up and the reason Apple refuses to adopt VP9 is not so arbitrary but rather because they're part of MPEG LA, with HEVC being the competitor to VP9. It's unfortunate that there's so much fragmentation with standards simply because of corporate interests.

It is unfortunate but it’s been happening forever.

And yet, things continue to work and continue to progress for the most part, so format wars aren’t necessarily as big a problem as we like to think.

... but uses VP9 exclusively for 4k content, which is the reason why Safari doesn't support 4k Youtube videos.

caniuse.com says av1 isn't supported in (all versions of) Safari, which also means it won't work on any iOS device.

libaom support in ffmpeg is still experimental.

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -strict experimental out.webm

Encoding on the CPU is less than 1fps now. rav1e is a bit faster. Hardware encoder support might be available on CPUs in 2020.

Yah rav1e is a bit faster, only a few weeks ago I tried to transcode large test movie was around 8 gbps of h264. I was using a big 20 core e5 and was doing almost 1/2 a frame per second. I seem to recall working out the estimated time to encode to AV1 was about 3 weeks...

Use Intel's AV1 encoder for more speed:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SVT-AV1-...

https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1

Thanks, it compiling this was a bit of a pain but I got it and do see some performance increase but wow slow. Still though, I know this is outside the scope of the article but I don't see AV1 catching on anytime soon and I half laugh to point out that 2027 when h264's patents expire isn't that far out! Everyone talks about hardware encoding options for h264 being available, let's not forget how crappy the output from h264 hardware encoding is compared to software encoding.

> I don't see AV1 catching on anytime soon

YouTube already has many of its videos encoded in AV1 up to 720p. Try it yourself with Firefox 67 beta, or any other browser which uses the dav1d decoder.

Turn on AV1 on YouTube (set it to "Always prefer AV1"): https://www.youtube.com/testtube

Try the AV1 playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqf6gJt7KuHBmeVzZteZ...

Pick any popular video on YouTube (like a music video) and play it. Check the format with right-click -> Stats for Nerds. If it's AV1 the codec will be "av01".

On my 5-year old laptop, AV1 in Firefox 67 beta is fast enough for 1080p30 and almost fast enough for 1080p60.

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