- https://web.archive.org/web/20260531130034/https://jbkempf.c...
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AV1 software decoding is already very intensive so AV2 decoding benchmarks are the next thing that would be really interesting (or mortifying) to see.
Hope we get a similar option with future lineups that support AV2, especially given how popular video creation and streaming are now.
The point of encoding is to reduce downstream bandwidth for the viewer, and upstream bandwidth for the distribution network.
The content creator only needs to upload it once.
Netflix uses AV1: https://netflixtechblog.com/av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-s...
YouTube uses AV1. It's tough to be more mainstream than that.
Right click on a YouTube video and select Stats for Nerds. If your system is capable of it, chances are it will be playing back in AV1.
Most of the YouTube videos I watch these days are AV1 encodes. Sometimes it's in VP9 and occasionally it's H.264.
Even on 1080p videos running on AV1 on 1x, the TV system bogs down and any kind of interaction has a variable 1-3s lag. On some TVs if you do 1.25x the TV automatically "downgrades" the resolution to 480p to avoid dropping frames.
I wish there was an option to still use VP9 / H.264 on those systems (even limited to 1080p).
What's missing mostly: live streams which are h264.
Currently, and I say currently, dav1d is so fast, no worries on that side.
Yes, this is going to be fun to watch.
Reading the MPEG1 specs back in the 90s as a child opened my eyes to how to define complex systems. For a media coding standard, they spent most of their time saying how to interpret encoded bytes, which I realized is genius. Be descriptive about decoding and you don't have to be prescriptive about encoding. Encoding is where you can apply all the creativity, but you need to provide a way to have a shared understanding of the encoded bytes.
... improvements around 25% compared to AV1
AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1 decoding
AV2 saves 25% bandwidth at the cost of 5x more decoding complexity.
I guess 5 years ago (around the time when Intel stopped making SSE-only chips) is technically "older", but I wouldn't prioritize avx2 when devices intended for consuming media definitely experience much less pressure to upgrade than workstations…
Shrek 1 at 8.34MB including audio.. insane
[1] https://archive.org/details/Shrek-Video-GBA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyOfPZQl4MI
*Da5id
Rust does not bring more performance. Just more safety.
Forgive the ignorance, I have worked entirely in the abstracted layers of the stack, and mostly web.
The way they weave these instructions can be very hard to express with a high level language.
Further, there's a ton of work with arrays and importantly parts of arrays. They can, for example, need to extract every other element up to 1/2 the array. Unfortunately, rust has runtime array bounds checks which make writing that sort of code slower. The compiler can elade those checks, but usually only in simple cases.
The authors would be writing a bunch of unsafe rust to get the performance they want and rust makes that more painful on purpose.
I like rust, but C/ASM really is the right choice here. This is one of the few cases where rust's safety is a major detriment.
If you can stand Lex Friedman for a bit, the VLC authors talk about why you use ASM for a video decoder instead of pure C or rust.
it's not much slower than the original C/ASM implementation (last i checked ~5%?) but that matters here
It does if you ask them, or at least research the topic at hand.
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav2d/-/blob/main/src/dat...
There is a project to write an AV1 decoder in Rust: Rav1d (really stretching the name here).
https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d
They got within 5% of the performance of dav1d and held a contest to close the gap but I think I read somewhere that this wasn't achieved.
https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rav1d-perf-bounty/
They claimed
> This is enough of a difference to be a problem for potential adopters, and, frankly, it just bothers us.
But in my opinion nobody actually cares about 5% in absolute terms. It's likely just Rust naysayers using that as an excuse.
I think the likely reason for dav2d using C is that they can reuse lots of code and infrastructure from dav1d. But I agree it would be much better if they worked on Rav2d instead (these names!). You can hardly complain about a 5% overhead if you're opting in to 5x more decoding complexity.
But now with AV2 and Dav2d, that completely breaks. Are we eventually going to get AV3/Dav3d and AV4/Dav4d, which will read like Ave/Daved and Ava/Davad? Seems a bit awkward. Was the idea from the start to have the 1 be the version number, and have it specifically be part of the name?
Tangent but I cannot wait for h269 (or h267 for the younger gen)
2av2furious?
Just “AV”
Next, AV Series 1 and 2 (released simultaneously)
Later, AV Edition but it costs $10,000
It's a semi-common last name.
AV1 was designed as royalty-free, but Sisvel ’s pool and the recent Dolby/Snap proved the contrary.
https://accessadvance.com/2026/03/24/access-advance-licensor...
They're claiming that there are patents, but that doesn't mean there are.
Consumer Display Device: EUR 0.32
Consumer Non-Display Device: EUR 0.11
(source here: https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programmes/audio-and-video-...)
Dolby is somewhat more interesting in that rather than scare tactics, media hype, and attempting to form a pool about it they are actually taking a patent assertion claim to court.
So they seem to be attempting to pull a fast one and use unproven claims to try and convert their competitor into a replacement revenue source.
It'll probably be a case of whoever has the best lawyers + contacts + persistence wins.
But it'll be interesting if discovery shows evidence they know they don't have a case and are trying it anyway. "Piercing the corporate veil" can theoretically be a consequence of that AFAIK.
I can claim the same and offer licenses per device.
Either go back read the answers there first, or I will assume you are part of a FUD campaign (yes, I know HN guidelines, but again every single AV2 news in the last week has seen the same rhetorical "questions" as top "comments").
Like we had weird examples like C compilers and Bun. This is a much more interesting example because its highly nontrivial.
AV1 exists, Dav1d exists. Lets see AI take the AV2 spec and Dav1d code and try to make a working high performance AV2 decoder.