zlacker

I'm surprised AV1 usage is only at 30%. Is AV1 so demanding that Netflix clients without AV1 hardware acceleration capabilities would be overwhelmed by it?

>>Eduard+(OP)
There are a lot of 10 year old TVs/fire sticks still in use that have a CPU that maxes out running the UI and rely exclusively on hardware decoding for all codecs (e.g. they couldn't hardware decode h264 either). Image a super budget phone from ~2012 and you'll have some idea the hardware capability we're dealing with.

>>Eduard+(OP)
Thanks to libdav1d's [1] lovingly hand crafted SIMD ASM instructions it's actually possible to reasonably playback AV1 without hardware acceleration, but basically yes: From Snapdragon 8 onwards, Google Tensor G3 onwards, NVIDIA RTX 3000 series onwards. All relatively new .

[1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

>>Eduard+(OP)
If you are on a mobile device, decoding without hardware assistance might not overwhelm the processors directly, but it might drain your battery unnecessarily fast?

>>Eduard+(OP)
tv manufacturers don't want high end chips for their tv sets... hardware decoding is just a way to make cheaper chips for tvs.

>>FrostK+z
Even RISC-V vector assembly[0].

0. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/-/issues/435

>>FrostK+z
It's possible without specific hardware acceleration, but murderous for mobile devices.

>>Eduard+(OP)
Compression gains will mostly be for the benefit of the streaming platform’s bills/infra unless you’re trying to stream 4K 60fps on hotel wifi (or if you can’t decode last-gen codecs on hardware either ). Apparently streaming platforms still favor user experience enough to not heat their rooms for no observable improvement. Also a TV CPU can barely decode a PNG still in software - video decoding of any kind is simply impossible.

>>Eduard+(OP)
They would be served h.265

>>Eduard+(OP)
I'd love to watch Netflix AV1 streams but they just straight up don't serve it to my smart TV or my Windows computers despite hardware acceleration support.

The only way I can get them to serve me an AV1 stream is if I block "protected content IDs" through browser site settings. Otherwise they're giving me an H.264 stream... It's really silly, to say the least

>>Eduard+(OP)
Absolutely. Playing back any video codec is a terrible experience without acceleration.

>>johnco+vb
> Apparently streaming platforms still favor user experience enough to not heat their rooms for no observable improvement

It’s more like “why does Netflix kill my battery within an hour when I used to be able to play for 20”