So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support, I wonder what will be the next one?

Just thought I'd extract the part I found interesting as a performance engineer.

But... did I miss it, or was there no mention of any tool to specify grain parameters up front? If you're shooting "clean" digital footage and you decide in post that you want to add grain, how do you convey the grain parameters to the encoder?

It would degrade your work and defeat some of the purpose of this clever scheme if you had to add fake grain to your original footage, feed the grainy footage to the encoder to have it analyzed for its characteristics and stripped out (inevitably degrading real image details at least a bit), and then have the grain re-added on delivery.

So you need a way to specify grain characteristics to the encoder directly, so clean footage can be delivered without degradation and grain applied to it upon rendering at the client.

I've found the ratio of a fixed quality vs CPU load to be better, and I've found it is reasonably good at retaining detail over smoothing things out when compared to HEVC. And the ability to add generated "pseudo grain" works pretty well to give the perception of detail. The performance of GPU encoders (while still not good enough fory maybe stringent standards) is better.

Sounds like they set HEVC to higher quality then? Otherwise how could it be the same as AVC?

https://www.androidcentral.com/streaming-tv/chromecast/netfl...

Honestly not complaining, because they were using AV1 with 800-900~kbps for 1080p content, which is clearly not enough compared to their 6Mbps h.264 bitrate.

It's really sad that most people never get to experience a good 4K Blu-ray, where the grain is actually part of the image as mastered and there's enough bitrate to not rely on sharpening.

I dont think that is true of any streamers. Otherwise they wouldnt provide the UI equivalent of a shopping centre that tries to get you lost and unable to find your way out.

So why isn’t it AV1 higher? The post doesn’t say, so we can only speculate. It feels like they’re preferring hardware decoding to software decoding, even if it’s an older codec. If this is true, it would make sense - it’s better for the client’s power and battery consumption.

But then why start work on AV2 before AV1 has even reached a majority of devices? I’m sure they have the answer but they’re not sharing here.

What’s the logic with changing the title here from the actual article title it was originally submitted with “AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming” to the generic and not at all representative title it currently has “AV1: a modern open codec”? That is neither the article title nor representative of the article content.