[kevincox]

h266 (aka VVC) is seemingly ~~late in development~~ (edit: It has been released but doesn't have much hardware uptake yet). They probably want to ensure that people are aware that it will be matched so that they don't commit to it and AV2 ends up a bit late to the party like AV1 is compared to h265 where it had a notable compatibility lead.

If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h266 and wait for the open alternative to ship.

[cogman10]

AV1 competes with h266. They were released near the same date. In many ways h266 has already lost the battle as nobody supports it even though it's been around just as long as AV1.

h267 is still in development and due to be released in 2028. That's the actual competitor with AV2.

[kevincox]

I guess it depends how you looked at it. Performance-wise AV1 seems more similar to h265. Hardware support wise h266 seems to have only had shipping hardware this year?

So I guess neither of these line up 1:1. I tend to see h265 and AV1 competing pretty hard right now so I tend to think of those as one generation and presumably h266 and AV2 will compete as the next generation.

[cogman10]

The way MPEG runs things there are some oddness with the likes of H265. MPEG likes to add little extensions to a codec over time. That's why H265 was first released in 2013 but ultimately had like 10 different extensions after that fact (the last one in 2024).

AV1 and VP9/VP8 before that have, in contrast, been pretty much static after they were released. AV1 has had a single errata after it's release.

So I could see why you'd see H265 as the competitor. I mostly don't simply because I believe they explicitly stated that they were trying to be competitive with 266.

I personally prefer the way AOMedia is running things and I suspect hardware manufacturers do as well. No licenses and AOM is creating open source reference encoders/decoders. They are working very hard to make it easy for manufacturers to be able to pick up the spec and run with it. Keeping the stream standard static for a long period also means manufacturers don't have to worry that they won't get a new extension next year. Content encoders are also reasonably guaranteed that their encoding with today's software still works with yesteryear hardware.

MPEG, on the other hand, is paywalling the crap out of everything.

[jorvi]

> So I could see why you'd see H265 as the competitor. I mostly don't simply because I believe they explicitly stated that they were trying to be competitive with 266.

That is some major revisionist history.

AV1 was created to suck all the oxygen out of the room for h265, and hopefully be finished soon enough that most chipsets would implement AV1 instead of h265, because no one would want to pay the royalty fees. This would then be a major boon to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Amazon. Only Apple had vested interest in h265.

Instead, h265 was finished very fast and Apple almost immediately implemented it on their iPhone chipsets, with their end goal being much smaller video recording sizes at high resolution and FPS. Then Intel added h265 decode to Quick Sync. This was the nail in the coffin for AV1. AV1 is only now seeing some limited uptake.

Hopefully AV2 can have its bitstream / spec frozen in time and garner hardware support before h266 does, otherwise the AV codecs will be forever niche because the MPEG group will always have the lead in hardware decode.

[brigade]

VVC isn't being considered for the internet by any western companies, but it's already gotten significant adoption by the Chinese companies that developed it.

[cogman10]

That's a weird pull. AFAIK the MPEG group is international. Broadcom, AFAIK, is the biggest pusher of VVC and they are American.

[brigade]

Anyone can participate, yes. For H.266, many of the big H.265 contributors didn't participate as much while Huawei, Tencent, Bytedance, Alibaba, etc. stepped up their contributions significantly. The bulk of the new coding tools were developed by them I believe.

[hulitu]

> If people know that AV2 is coming and competitive they may avoid adopting h266 and wait for the open alternative to ship.

But why hurry ? AV3 will come soon and it will be better. /s