| >HEVC is actually a standard, and has been for many years. Once the AV1 bitstream is frozen, it will also be a 'standard', only this will be royalty free. >there are Open Sources like x265, and many other commercial solution as well. Nothing prevents x265 devs from making xAV1 (or whatever AV1 will end up being called), their spokesperson over at Doom9 has already said that they will go where the market goes in terms of encoder development, they are also very pissed in regards to the HEVC licensing debacle. >we shall wait and see when it finalized. Indeed, the bitstream is (supposed) to be finalized this month, after that happens we will finally see optimization take place (basically rewriting all hot spots into handwritten assembly) and thus be able to assess the quality claims and just how much slower it will be. >Well that is only half correct because Netflix are already encoding in HEVC. Netflix was one of the first companies to join AOM to develop a royalty free codec, it seems clear their intentions is to replace HEVC with AV1 once wide hardware support arrives. >There are zero Full hardware AV1 decoder There can't be until the bitstream has been frozen, from what I've read the first hardware supporting AV1 will be 12-18 months after said bitstream freeze. Throughout the development of AV1, there's been constant consulting with hardware developers and they have had a large say in how AV1 works, the hardware companies that are part of AOM are: Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, NVidia, Realtek and now recently Apple >So apart from being royalty free, AV1 doesn't have a lot of advantage to it. If the estimates are correct, ~30% better compression is a HUGE advantage, another advantage from the point of the companies in AOM is that developing a codec themselves means it will fulfill their needs much better. Google was going this route ever since they purchased On2, but now it really has reached critical mass with their third generation codec (VP10) being the base for AV1 which has made practically all the big tech companies come together and solve their codec needs using it. >Apple joining on board, with No Press Release from AOM I think Apple didn't want to ruffle any feathers with MPEGLA and the other HEVC licensees, Apple picking up HEVC support across their products was seen as a good sign for HEVC, the same Apple joining all the other tech giants in AOM backing AV1 is quite the opposite. Thus they join with no fanfare. Pure speculation of course. |