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AV1
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. In 2018, Facebook re-encoded 400 compressed Facebook videos with AV1, VP9, and x264 and found AV1 delivered around 34% lower bitrates than VP9 and about 50% lower than x264 at similar visual quality, though encoding was much slower.
Like VP9, but unlike H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that does not hinder adoption in open-source projects.
AVIF is an image file format that uses AV1 compression algorithms.
The Alliance's motivations for creating AV1 included the high cost and uncertainty involved with the patent licensing of HEVC (also known as H.265), the MPEG-designed codec expected to succeed AVC. Additionally, the Alliance's seven founding members – Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix – announced that the initial focus of the video format would be delivery of high-quality web video. The official announcement of AV1 came with the press release on the formation of the Alliance for Open Media on 1 September 2015. Only 42 days before, on 21 July 2015, HEVC Advance's initial licensing offer was announced to be an increase over the royalty fees of its predecessor, AVC. In addition to the increased cost, the complexity of the licensing process increased with HEVC. Unlike previous MPEG standards where the technology in the standard could be licensed from a single entity, MPEG LA, when the HEVC standard was finished, two patent pools had been formed with a third pool on the horizon. In addition, various patent holders were refusing to license patents via either pool, increasing uncertainty about HEVC's licensing. According to Microsoft's Ian LeGrow, an open-source, royalty-free technology was seen as the easiest way to eliminate this uncertainty around licensing.
The negative effect of patent licensing on free and open-source software has also been cited as a reason for the creation of AV1. For example, building an H.264 implementation into Firefox would prevent it from being distributed free of charge since licensing fees would have to be paid to MPEG-LA. Free Software Foundation Europe has argued that FRAND patent licensing practices make the free software implementation of standards impossible due to various incompatibilities with free-software licenses.
Many of the components of the AV1 project were sourced from previous research efforts by Alliance members. Individual contributors had started experimental technology platforms years before: Xiph's/Mozilla's Daala published code in 2010, Google's experimental VP9 evolution project VP10 was announced on 12 September 2014, and Cisco's Thor was published on 11 August 2015. Building on the code base of VP9, AV1 incorporates additional techniques, several of which were developed in these experimental formats.
Many companies are part of Alliance for Open Media, including Samsung, Vimeo, Microsoft, Netflix, Mozilla, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, ARM, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Amazon, Hulu, VideoLAN, Adobe, and Apple. Apple is an AOMedia governing member, although it joined after the formation. The management of the AV1 streams has been officially included among the typological videos manageable by Coremedia.
The first version 0.1.0 of the AV1 reference codec was published on April 7, 2016. Although a soft feature freeze came into effect at the end of October 2017, development continued on several significant features. The bitstream format, was projected to be frozen in January 2018 but was delayed due to unresolved critical bugs as well as further changes to transformations, syntax, the prediction of motion vectors, and the completion of legal analysis.[citation needed] The Alliance announced the release of the AV1 bitstream specification on March 28, 2018, along with a reference, software-based encoder and decoder. On 25 June 2018, a validated version 1.0.0 of the specification was released. On January 8, 2019, a validated version 1.0.0 with Errata 1 of the specification was released. Martin Smole from AOM member Bitmovin said that the computational efficiency was the greatest remaining challenge after the bitstream format freeze had been completed. While working on the format, the encoder was not targeted for production use and speed optimizations were not prioritized. Consequently, the early version of AV1 was orders of magnitude slower than existing HEVC encoders. Much of the development effort was consequently shifted towards improving the reference encoder. In March 2019, it was reported that the speed of the reference encoder had improved greatly and was within the same order of magnitude as encoders for other common formats.
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AV1
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. In 2018, Facebook re-encoded 400 compressed Facebook videos with AV1, VP9, and x264 and found AV1 delivered around 34% lower bitrates than VP9 and about 50% lower than x264 at similar visual quality, though encoding was much slower.
Like VP9, but unlike H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that does not hinder adoption in open-source projects.
AVIF is an image file format that uses AV1 compression algorithms.
The Alliance's motivations for creating AV1 included the high cost and uncertainty involved with the patent licensing of HEVC (also known as H.265), the MPEG-designed codec expected to succeed AVC. Additionally, the Alliance's seven founding members – Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix – announced that the initial focus of the video format would be delivery of high-quality web video. The official announcement of AV1 came with the press release on the formation of the Alliance for Open Media on 1 September 2015. Only 42 days before, on 21 July 2015, HEVC Advance's initial licensing offer was announced to be an increase over the royalty fees of its predecessor, AVC. In addition to the increased cost, the complexity of the licensing process increased with HEVC. Unlike previous MPEG standards where the technology in the standard could be licensed from a single entity, MPEG LA, when the HEVC standard was finished, two patent pools had been formed with a third pool on the horizon. In addition, various patent holders were refusing to license patents via either pool, increasing uncertainty about HEVC's licensing. According to Microsoft's Ian LeGrow, an open-source, royalty-free technology was seen as the easiest way to eliminate this uncertainty around licensing.
The negative effect of patent licensing on free and open-source software has also been cited as a reason for the creation of AV1. For example, building an H.264 implementation into Firefox would prevent it from being distributed free of charge since licensing fees would have to be paid to MPEG-LA. Free Software Foundation Europe has argued that FRAND patent licensing practices make the free software implementation of standards impossible due to various incompatibilities with free-software licenses.
Many of the components of the AV1 project were sourced from previous research efforts by Alliance members. Individual contributors had started experimental technology platforms years before: Xiph's/Mozilla's Daala published code in 2010, Google's experimental VP9 evolution project VP10 was announced on 12 September 2014, and Cisco's Thor was published on 11 August 2015. Building on the code base of VP9, AV1 incorporates additional techniques, several of which were developed in these experimental formats.
Many companies are part of Alliance for Open Media, including Samsung, Vimeo, Microsoft, Netflix, Mozilla, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, ARM, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Amazon, Hulu, VideoLAN, Adobe, and Apple. Apple is an AOMedia governing member, although it joined after the formation. The management of the AV1 streams has been officially included among the typological videos manageable by Coremedia.
The first version 0.1.0 of the AV1 reference codec was published on April 7, 2016. Although a soft feature freeze came into effect at the end of October 2017, development continued on several significant features. The bitstream format, was projected to be frozen in January 2018 but was delayed due to unresolved critical bugs as well as further changes to transformations, syntax, the prediction of motion vectors, and the completion of legal analysis.[citation needed] The Alliance announced the release of the AV1 bitstream specification on March 28, 2018, along with a reference, software-based encoder and decoder. On 25 June 2018, a validated version 1.0.0 of the specification was released. On January 8, 2019, a validated version 1.0.0 with Errata 1 of the specification was released. Martin Smole from AOM member Bitmovin said that the computational efficiency was the greatest remaining challenge after the bitstream format freeze had been completed. While working on the format, the encoder was not targeted for production use and speed optimizations were not prioritized. Consequently, the early version of AV1 was orders of magnitude slower than existing HEVC encoders. Much of the development effort was consequently shifted towards improving the reference encoder. In March 2019, it was reported that the speed of the reference encoder had improved greatly and was within the same order of magnitude as encoders for other common formats.
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