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Comment by wolfspider | Hacker News Reader

Well sure, but the hardware encode and decode isn’t completely widespread yet. I’ve been patiently waiting for what has felt like an eternity. From the developer perspective everyone needs to have access to it or I’m just sitting on my hands waiting for the capabilities to trickle down to the majority of users. Hopefully more users will purchase hardware if it features AV1 encode/decode. They need a logo that says “AV1 inside” or something. So, for example only the iPhone 15 pro offers hardware decode so far in the iPhone lineup.

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You inevitably have to do multiple encodes. An H.264 encode as the "plays anywhere" option and an AV1 encode as the "less bandwidth or better image quality at the same bandwidth" option.

YouTube does H.264, VP9, and AV1 video encodes with AAC and Opus audio encodes.

This video for example has encodes of all those options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArmDp-zijuc

You can watch it in multiple resolutions and formats from 4K in AV1 down to 144p in H.264.

This only happens because they're using Cisco's license. H.264 is not "plays anywhere".

By your definition then nothing would be "plays anywhere". H.264 is about the closest you can get. And depending on Profiles it is about to become patent free where license will no longer be required.

Get a cheap Intel ARC A310 card. I have one in my workstation along side my AMD GPU purely for streaming/encoding. It works great.

Then the issue kind of becomes software support. For example, something like Handbrake will gladly use AV1, but Kdenlive will refuse to acknowledge that it exists (at least for hardware encode, last I checked; that said, they still mark NVENC as experimental).

Also, OBS handles AV1 nicely, but you can’t stream to a site like Twitch because they only support H264 outside of specific experiments.

That said, Arc GPUs are nice, I have an A580 and while the drivers aren’t as mature as Nvidia or AMD, I got it for a pretty good price and they’re gradually patching things out.

That only works if you actually own a desktop though. It's too bad they don't have some ultra tiny SD card sized accelerator addon system or something for laptops

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