Based on AV1's trajectory, hardware encode isn't necessary (though it is nice). The current encoder is a reference encoder. Now that the spec is finalized, expect significant speed improvements from production encoders (realtime likely won't happen until we get it in hardware though)
I strongly disagree with it not being required. I run a small social news site - AV1 is still prohibatively expensive both for the server and clients for software encoding/decoding. Without hardware encoding, the tradeoff for better compression ratios in exchange for massive battery use + very long processing times for encoding simply isn't worth it. In order to get AV1 out, I have to often process a h264 version of a video first anyway, just so the client isn't left waiting for their video upload to finish encoding. This means to support AV1 I'm not saving anything on the storage side. Even youtube only does AV1 encodes for extremely popular videos - it only makes sense to do at significant scale.
I love AV1, don't get me wrong, and I can't wait til I can switch over to it as a single unified format for both images and video, but for now the cost is too high until hardware acceleration becomes ubiquitous
Hardware encode is required if you want things like video calls, camera recording and such to use it.
It isn’t required for content distribution platforms which aren’t realtime and the cost of encode is easily made up by hundreds of thousands of streams.
One of the interesting usage of AV1 was specifically for low bitrate calls, and software encoding was perfectly fine, even on mobile.
With low enough resolution, framerate and bitrate, you can get a quality stream without significant encoding artifacts compared to any other codec. It is in production right now and has been for a while.
The tradeoff CPU / bandwidth is quite advantageous in situations like this. And no, AV1 HW encoders cannot usually be used, they are not designed for a tight bitrate control or realtime communications like software encoding is usually.
> One of the interesting usage of AV1 was specifically for low bitrate calls, and software encoding was perfectly fine, even on mobile.
You really want hardware decoding on mobile, otherwise you end up with 40 minutes battery life. Fortunately, for typical videoconference resolutions, VP8 and H.264 are just fine. AV1 is nice to have, though, due to excellent support for synthetic content (screen sharing), and for scalable video coding (a much more elegant solution than simulcast, IMHO).
In the world I live in, the general plan is to stick to VP8 and H.264 for the time being, and to skip to AV1 when it's universally available on mobile. I haven't seen any features of AV2 which would justify waiting for it.
Have you said this for Audio Codec I would have agreed. I do not know a single Smartphone Video Conferencing software that uses CPU encoding rather than hardware encoding. Neither WhatsApp or FaceTime, perhaps the largest of the two real time Video Call uses AV1.
Yeah, no production or large scale VC system is running software AV1 encoders on smartphones. You will drain a full phone battery in 1-2 hours of calls.
It just doesn’t make sense and will result in extraordinary power/battery drainage at best, or output that’s worse than hardware encoding.
The only way you could get AV1 to software encode in realtime AND low latency on a mid-range Android chip is by disabling or skipping nearly all of the compression/encoding features that make it good at low bitrate.
> Yeah, no production or large scale VC system is running software AV1 encoders on smartphones. You will drain a full phone battery in 1-2 hours of calls.
Yeah but, half jokingly, Zoom does that (draining the battery in an hour) already :P
So, status remains quo, the commons remain tragic, and glory to H.264 forever?
At least until a better codec has widespread enough hardware support, I think.
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Anything running on a battery will need hardware acceleration
Even without encoding, as long as decoding is supported for AV2, streaming sites like Youtube can always transcode uploads. The encoder on mobile hardware is more of a nice bonus as long as we have an AV1 encoder available in the meantime.