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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

It's bad. As a reference, I tried decoding a measly 2 mbit/s test clip on an older Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (which has no issues playing back the same in H.264 purely with software decoding), and it stuttered a lot. I don't see this thing taking off until there's decent GPU acceleration in place. "Fast decoder" is highly relative.

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> older Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro

Core 2 Duo are processors from 16 years ago...

Mobile phones are more powerful than those machines...

Yes, most are. That Core 2 Duo machine is the weakest hardware I have that I know can decode H.264 lower bitrate FullHD content in software. It made for a good benchmarking baseline.

And those machine cannot decode H265 in software… Sorry but you cannot say dav1d software decoding is bad on phones because some hardware from 15 years ago who can barely decode H264 cannot decode it.

It will drain your device battery pretty fast because of high CPU usage. There's nothing good about such a performance. It's just bad.

As all software decoders… So you compare software to hardware decoders?

H265 or VP9 in software are the same… Here, we managed to have a sw decoder for a format that is one order of magnitude more complex than those codecs and yet, consume less CPU.

"So you compare software to hardware decoders?"

No. I understand your vitriol, but please just stop. I'm not demeriting AV1's technical basis.

I tried decoding a measly 2 mbit/s AV1 test clip on a 2014 MacBook Pro with a 2.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 and it was buttery smooth.

So is an H.264/H.265 video clip at 5 or even 10 mbit/s on my 4 years old iPhone, at about 2 watts of power consumption instead of 35 watts. Can you see the advantage?

I like open and free standards, and I dislike royalties, but the political aspect is best foregone when one of the alternatives really is objectively so much better for everyone.

One of the alternatives is clearly not objectively so much better for everyone. If they were so much better then VP9 and AV1 wouldn't exist. Here's what video streamers say:

https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better...

https://engineering.fb.com/2018/04/10/video-engineering/av1-...

https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-and...

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/bringing-av1-streaming-t...

https://bitmovin.com/bitmovin-improves-av1-video-encoding/

https://blog.webex.com/video-conferencing/cisco-leap-frogs-h...

https://blog.webex.com/engineering/the-av1-video-codec-comes...

Your problem is fundamentally an emotional one. Now that you suspect Device X will perform poorly at Task Y you feel buyer's remorse.

Try not to worry about it so much. Computer hardware will continue to be made obsolete by more demanding software for quite some time yet.

There are no emotions involved here, with the exception of your childish choice to try misconstrue my argument. I consider the MPEG family as objectively better on the technical merit of GPU/VPU hardware decoding being available everywhere - it's fast and it's energy efficient.

> There are no emotions involved here

Of course there are. This is typical.

> I consider the MPEG family as objectively better on the technical merit of GPU/VPU hardware decoding being available everywhere

Then there will never be any codec development. It's a silly position to take.

You're very stubborn with telling me what my position and my own arguments are. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you're not just looking for people to rile up, but rather have the bad habit of leaping ahead and making other people's arguments and stances up on your own to better fit your desired counterpoint, so I'll clarify: I am certainly not against new development or progress, and I don't think that it's pointless to put an effort into AV1 or VP9. As I wrote elsewhere in this discussion, I just don't see this taking off until there's hardware decoding available, which I fully expect there to be. I'm merely underlining that the MPEG family is the state of the art.

> I just don't see this taking off until there's hardware decoding available

Hardware decoding is available. And dav1d is a very fast software decoder. I don't have AV1 hardware and yet I play back AV1 on YouTube just fine via dav1d.

> I'm merely underlining that the MPEG family is the state of the art.

It isn't.

This is not true.

AV1 is at least as widely supported as VVC.

Nothing supports hardware decoding if mpeg EVC, and hardware decoding if the original mpeg 4 (xvid generation) was never a big deal.

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