Here's the Emmy that C-Cube Microsystems won back in 1995 for the MPEG-2 (actually unconstrained MPEG-1) encoder chip set used in the roll-out of DirecTV.
The original DirecTV encoder was MPEG-1 at 704x480 using eight CL4000 chips. Then in 1995 when the MPEG-2 capable CL4010 was finished, the encoders were upgraded to MPEG-2 (frame only encoding). Then upgraded again to a 12 chip AFF (Adaptive Field/Frame) encoder when the firmware was completed.
> AV1 fixed a structural problem in the ecosystem at the time, but the work isn’t finished. Video demand keeps rising, and the next generation of open codecs must remain competitive.
> AOMedia is working on the upcoming release of AV2. It will feature meaningfully better compression than AV1, much higher efficiency for screen/graphical content, alpha channel support, and more.
That's all nice and good, but please make AV1 as widespread as H264, so that I can just import it in every editing program as well instead of having Adobe Premiere Pro complain about not knowing what that format is (well, I personally prefer DaVinci Resolve, but my editor is on Adobe). But yeah, I think that AV1 is great but would like support for it across the board, on every device (hardware decoding and encoding) as well as Kdenlive and Resolve and all the other editors and everything on the software side.
Some Sony TV's only hardware accelerate AV1 content through streaming services, and not through Blueray and USB...
Right now, I have a drive filled with H264 content that I can hook up to any old hotel TV and play back. It's gonna be a while before I switch to AV1. And is H264 by now largely out of patent anyway?
Are you aware that you are barking up the wrong tree? AOMedia already made AV1 a free and open standard, if Adobe does not want to do an engineer's afternoon worth of work to link a C library into their executable, then that's on their head, not AOMedia's.
Less of a plea with AOMedia (it's not like they can't work on AV2 when AV1 is out there but doesn't have full adoption), and more at the industry as a whole - otherwise we'll still see H264 be widespread by 2030 and onwards because there's not enough interest in modern codecs even when they don't have licensing bullshit going on.
I recently learnt that one can download WOFF files from any website that uses them, and convert them into TTF files (using an online tool pike CloudConvert) if we wanted to use them in say a MS Word or Powerpoint slide deck.
This allowed me to create a custom powerpoint theme / twmplate that captures the essense of a particular brand.
Worth noting that web fonts are often split up across multiple files for sets of codepoints and font weights/styles, so depending on the language you're writing in a single WOFF file might be missing a few letters.
On a similar note Matt Parker recently released a video about Perlin Noise, which won an Oscar (for Technical Achievement) in 1996: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrLSfSh43oA
Well, VP8 was only released as an open codec in 2010, and subject of patent lawsuits until late 2014.
In 2010 the majority of (YouTube and other) videos were still served as H.264, because no major browser supported it back then and the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones (without vp8 decoding capabilities)
iOS for example didn't support VP8 until iOS12 in 2019, Firefox and MS IE only added it in 2011. Even Google only added VP8 to Chrome in September 2010.
> In 1990, both Ritchie and Thompson received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), "for the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language".
> In 1997, both Ritchie and Thompson were made Fellows of the Computer History Museum, "for co-creation of the UNIX operating system, and for development of the C programming language."
> On April 21, 1999, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the National Medal of Technology of 1998 from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language
video decoding on a general-purpose cpu is difficult, so most devices that can play video include some sort of hardware video decoding chip. if you want your video to play well, you need to deliver it in a format that can be decoded by that chip, on all the devices that you want to serve.
so it takes a long time to transition to a new codec - new devices need to ship with support for your new codec, and then you have to wait until old devices get lifecycled out before you can fully drop support for old codecs.
To this day no AppleTV boxes support hardware AV1 decode (which essentially means it’s not supported). Only the latest Roku Ultra devices support it. So obviously Netflix, for example, can’t switch everyone over to AV1 even if they want to.
The whole video/movie industry is rife with mature, hardware-implemented patents. The kind that survive challenges. They are also owned by deep pockets (not fly-by-night patent trolls). Fortunately, the industry is mature enough, that some of the older patents are aging out.
The image processing industry is similar, but not as mature. I hated dealing with patents, when I was writing image processing stuff.
Timing. Patent encumbered codecs get a foothold through physical media and broadcast first. Then hw manufactures license it. Then everyone is forced to license them. Free codecs have a longer path to market as they need to avoid the patents and get hw and sw support.
Backwards compatibility. If you host a lot of compressed video content, you probably didn't store the uncompressed versions so any new encoding is a loss of fidelity. Even if you were willing to take that gamble, you have to wait until all your users are on a modern enough browser to use the new codec. Frankly, the winner that takes all is H.264 because it's already everywhere.
AV1 is still worse in practice than H.265 for high-fidelity (high bitrate) encoding. It's being improved, but even at high bitrates it has a tendency to blur.
> AV1 is also the foundation for the image format AVIF, which is deployed across browsers and provides excellent compression for still and animated images
I wish adoption was better. When will Wikipedia support AVIF?
Way wider browser adoption, potential to evolve together with AV#, since it's using a container format, so it shouldn't be limited to AV1 base. I.e. sites just need to adopt AVIF, and I expect then seamless ability to start using AV2 (and on) there without sites needing another wave of adding a new mime type and etc. which seems to be a huge hurdle.
It doesn't matter that AVIF uses the same container for AV1 or AV2 based encoding, if the browsers don't have the right decoder for it then they can't decode it.
An example of this is MP4: Browsers can decode videos encoded with H264 in MP4 containers, but not H265 even if it uses the same container, because one thing is the container and another thing is the codec, they're related but they aren't the same.
https://www.w6rz.net/DCP_1235.JPG
The original DirecTV encoder was MPEG-1 at 704x480 using eight CL4000 chips. Then in 1995 when the MPEG-2 capable CL4010 was finished, the encoders were upgraded to MPEG-2 (frame only encoding). Then upgraded again to a 12 chip AFF (Adaptive Field/Frame) encoder when the firmware was completed.
https://www.w6rz.net/videorisc.png
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