- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
"Set for a year-end release, AV2 is not only an upgrade to the widely adopted AV1 but also a foundational piece of AOMedia’s future tech stack.
AV2, a generation leap in open video coding and the answer to the world’s growing streaming demands, delivers significantly better compression performance than AV1. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. AV2 marks a milestone on the path to an open, innovative future of media experiences."
Well yeah given who makes it but it’s what I care about. I couldn’t care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn’t designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.
Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn’t likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.
Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it’s hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn’t benefit the user in any way really.
Yep, fully agree. At least BluRays still exist for now. Building a beefy NAS and collecting full BluRay disks allows us to brute force the picture quality through sheer bitrate at least. There are a number of other problems to think about as well before we even get to the encoder stage, such as many (most?) 4k movies/TV shows being mastered in 2k (aka 1080p) and then upscaled to 4k. Not to mention a lot of 2k BluRays are upscaled from 720p! It just goes on and on. As a whole, we’re barely using the capabilities of true 4k in our current day. Most of this UHD/4k “quality” craze is being driven by HDR, which also has its own share of design/cultural problems. The more you dig into all this stuff the worse it gets. 4k is billed as “the last resolution we’ll ever need”, which IMO is probably true, but they don’t tell you that the 4k discs they’re selling you aren’t really 4k.