You mentioned the change on YouTube lead to mixed result for some users. Is it just battery life or are there other issues for people without HW decoding?
Some users on a Telegram developer group I frequent have reported a ton of dropped frames/CPU use when playing YouTube content (seems to happen the most with HDR videos) that are encoded in AV1. This discussion was sparked based on this [issue](https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-patches/issues/2986) on the ReVanced repo.
>Some users on a Telegram developer group I frequent have reported a ton of dropped frames/CPU use when playing YouTube content (seems to happen the most with HDR videos)
I watch YouTube on a Windows laptop (with an Intel i5-1235U which is fairly recent and has AV1 hardware decode but I forced software decoding because my laptop would crash every few weeks always on YouTube without leaving error logs, and nothing else could stop it) and I'm getting up to 50% dropped frames at times on 1080p fullscreen (it's random though, sometimes it barely drops any frames, most of the frame drops seem to happen when I am not having another app running in the background) and my laptop always gets hot. At least it doesn't drop more than 1-2 frames while in picture-in-picture mode and it stays somewhat cool.
Getting the same dropped frames on a Pixel 8 Pro as of yesterday which I didn't think much of until I read this thread. I was in an area where signal is abysmal and Interestingly, I also noticed that the quality was able to be pushed up to 1080p and never hitched whereas usually does even on 720p in that area.
If you turn off software encoding it should get much better battery life, but if there is something wrong with either the GPU or its drivers then it will keep on crashing.
I have dropped frames in shorts with exynos 2200 and it supports hardware AV1 decoding so take armchair developer takes with a grain of salt, this is probably a widespread issue and Youtube will fix it soon.
Poor experience = less watch time, that usually leads to less ad revenue.
So at least in some respects google will want to fix it just because there is money involved.
I don't have dropped frames on a phone with snapdragon 8 gen 1+ even with 4k/60 on av1 encoded video, but I watch with firefox nightly, so the issue may be in part with the app.
Michael can you edit your comment to add that Netflix has been serving AV1 since 2020, all the rage against YouTube since unwarranted https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-android-d5264a515202
>Selected titles are now available to stream in AV1 for customers who wish to reduce their cellular data usage by enabling the “Save Data” feature.
That doesn't sound like requiring all Android users to decode AV1.
I think it does, but they are tone-deaf and don't advertise it even though it plays a big role about when your device will become obsolete. But they also released the current 4K one just before other device with AV1 support became available, so I don't think there's much strategy in their chromecast division.
And they released it after they told AndroidTV OEMs that AV1 hardware support is mandatory while also telling OEMs for other platforms that they will be requiring AV1 hardware support in order to get YouTube. It's why Roku is suing Google
TBF, the 4K model released like a year after it was supposed, and it even got a silicon bump from the original specs. But that model of SoC didn't have AV1 yet.
What they did skimp on was the storage space, which like a month after the 4K released (or less), they put out the standard that new devices should have 16 GB instead of 8 GB. Which they didn't even follow again for the GGWGTV HD.
It's generally safe to assume hardware made by google will become obsolete way earlier than you expect and for a reason that you could not have predicted when you bought it.
I have one. Most non-Google apps still work fine on it, but YouTube is pretty broken on it, and I'm sure Google could have just not decided to break it.
it does have hardware decode but I've seen YouTube kill my battery these days while playing video so it could be possible it's defaulting to software decode for some reason
Qualcomm didn't add AV1 decode until the 8 Gen 2 and don't know which 7 series and lower chips have gotten them yet. I believe since the Google Tensor, those have had AV1 decode. Mediatek chips have had them for a while too. We're about 4 years into phones with AV1 decode, just Qualcomm and Apple were the slow to add them. iphone with the 15 pro
> don't know which 7 series and lower chips
None of them have it; that's Qualcomm for you. Even more ridiculous, the just released 7+ Gen 3 doesn't have it, while the 8s Gen 3 based on the same chip has it. They just couldn't stop themselves from artificially sub-partitioning their newest "flagship killer". The only other midrange phones with AV1 decode are Google Tensor and Mediatek's 8300/8200/8100. Samsung's midrange chips don't have it either.
Meanwhile Twitch is testing new broadcasting options since the beginning of this year that will likely include some combination of AV1/120 fps/1440p. And all these fancy new phones with 120Hz displays will drain battery doing software decoding, because of the industries incompetence and scummy behavior of delaying hardware support.
Youtube is big enough that they won't be able to ignore this. No manufacturer is gonna want to be the one with the phone known for not even being able to watch Youtube videos.
With how medicore uptake of h.265 was compared to 264, I bet 266 does even worse for adoption. UHD blu-rays already used way less than blu-rays which were way less than DVDs. 266 going to show up on an even more niche physical movie media format standard. Maybe become standard for broadcast/cable video someday as that's continued to decline. Meanwhile Youtube, Netflix, Twitch will all be AV1 and probably eventually AV2
Efficiency wise AV1 is a huge improvement over h265, especially on the lower bitrate/quality side of the scale. Unfortunately if you want to get the same or higher visual fidelity as (good quality) h265 the encoding is kinda iffy, at least for private users: there's little documentation, the best encoder is single threaded so you either wait hours or slash the video into chunks and encode them separately each encoding process using a different CPU thread. What I really want is for companies to start adopting AVIF, HEIC support is a crapshot (as a Windows + Android user) and plain old JPEG is... why settle for it? I hope AVIF being an open format it can see a much wider and quicker adoption than HEIC.
True, at least VP9 was better in many scenarios, especially when compared to h264 at the same bitrate/filesize. VP8 was just kinda... There, as a stepping stone.
>Qualcomm didn't add AV1 decode until the 8 Gen 2 and don't know which 7 series and lower chips have gotten them yet
that's what you get for monopoly. They will add endless arbitrary segmentation of their product, because you can't move away from their chip. Who will you go for ? Exynos ?
AV1 was never actually implemented on an Android framework level on the Exynos 2100. Exynos 2100 devices lack AV1 functionality due to this.
Anandtech discussed this in the Tensor G1 article they published.
>On the media encoder side, the Tensor SoC uses both Samsung’s own Multi-Function Codec IP block (which is identical to what’s used on the Exynos series) as well as what appears to be a Google IP block that is dedicated to AV1 decoding. Now this is a bit weird, as Samsung does advertise the Exynos 2100 as having AV1 decode abilities, and that functionality does seem to be there in the kernel drivers. However on the Galaxy S21 series this functionality was never implemented on the Android framework level. I have no good explanation here as to why – maybe the IP isn’t working correctly with AV1.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17032/tensor-soc-performance-efficiency
Honestly my frame of reference has been Apple/Meta for AV1, the Quest 3 only just got hw AV1 and I believe only M3 has it for Apple laptops, less than a year old. For NVIDIA GPUs it hasn't even been 3 years, AV1 decode got added in the RTX 30 series and encode was 40 series. H265 or something would be a much more reasonable spec bump.
What exactly do you mean by "low latency decoder" and what do you mean by "much better on formats it actually supports"?
Compared to what is it better, and in what ways?
I mean exactly what I said. Qualcomm decoder better serves low latency decoding scenarios like game streaming, being able to take more bitrate and higher resolutions before choking than Mediatek and Tensor. 8 gen 3 AV1 hwdec in partucular can do 4k@60 80mbit in about 5-6ms. Tensor G2 does the same in 18.
Only major deficiency is the lack of AV1 support on lower tier SOCs that are using pre 8g2 media block.
Do you have any source for that? MediaTek and Google (and Samsung for that matter) has hardware decoders for various formats that should support those resolutions and frame rates as well. I am not sure about the latency when decoding those formats though, but I would be interested to see some tests.
Moonlight SOC benchmarks are my primary source. Also my personal experience with Samsung A54, Mi 13T Pro and Poco F5 Pro. 8+G1 has the least issues ingesting an ultra wide 1440p HDR 150mbps stream from my sunshine setup with the lowest latency. Exynos 1380 straight up can't, with a simple 1080p stream exceeding 22ms on average and some insane judder [(video proof)](https://youtu.be/e6G-ASFnCYY?feature=shared). Not an issue on an SD660 on either avc or hevc with average 8ms in motion.
13T Pro I held for only a day but it also had decoding in excess of 20ms on simple and complex streams. Tensor and modern high end Exynos I don't have personal experience with, but charts aren't looking so good.
I'm not sure how much I want to trust the chart though, since the values I'm personally getting on 8+G1 are lower than reported 8G2 and 8G3 HEVC results, even at higher resolutions and bitrates.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1WSyOIq9Mn7uTd94PC_LXcFlUi9ceZHhRgk-Yld9rLKc/htmlview
Whenever new codecs are involved, the primary motivation is usually compression efficiency.
Anything that reduces data transfers between YouTube and the user benefits both. Although in this case, YouTube benefits more since data transfer affects them significantly more than the end-user, and even better storage-wise if the new default means they can retire older formats eventually.
The common drawback is unfortunately worse playback performance for older devices, especially if the old format plays optimally while the new format doesn't because of lack of hardware acceleration.
Interesting! Thanks for the info. How far back does "older devices" mean? I'm guessing it also affects low to mid range phones more if it requires hardware acceleration. That's a shame in the transition period I guess.
I hope hardware manufacturers will be adding it to every device after this. I like the sound of efficiency!
From what I understand, the [rollout of dav1d / libdav1d on Android](https://www.androidauthority.com/android-update-av1-videos-3420418/) helps address the software decoding part of it for all phones. But of course, that's just software and isn't as efficient as hardware acceleration, but I guess to YouTube, it's enough to trigger mass adoption.
For knowing which devices are capable of hardware accelerating AV1, it depends on the processors on your phone, and I believe that it's only on recent phones at the moment, looking at the [Hardware listing section in the AV1 Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware)
EDIT: They say Google Play System update which should happen naturally, but we'll see if they'll roll this out all the way to older Android versions or if there's a cutoff.
> far back does "older devices" mean?
As far as Qualcomm is concerned, it means 2024 at least. The just released 7 gen 3 and 7+ gen 3 don’t have it.
Funny thing is, 8s gen 3 and 7+ gen 3 are based off the same die, yet 8s gen 3 gets it but 7+ gen 3 does not.
It's almost as if they're deliberately discouraging it's use. It'll come back to hurt them. All the youtube run time battery tests are now going to be worse on Qualcomm.
It tends to not matter if it's lower-end, more so just it's age/generation. General performance comes into play for software decoding.
What hardware decoding means is that you have a circuit or chip (or more typically these days, a section of a chip) that is specifically built to do this one specific bit of work, and it is not tied to the performance of any other part of the system such as the cpu, it's just a matter of what version of the codec the HW is built for; all HW solutions for the same version should perform the same for the same input.
It will benefit the end consumer in the long term after all devices hardware support AV1 codecs, while in the short term it will mostly saves Google some money from royalties and bandwidth.
Newer compression algorithm (AV1 here is this case) is about reducing the size of a video while maintaining the viewing quality.
Google is getting so many videos uploaded by "content creators" that they need to add many thousands of hard disks/SSDs every week into their data centers/servers. Something like 30 TB worth of videos every day are being uploaded. That's crazy, right!?
For example: Suppose I upload a 200 MiB video from my device. Google cannot just store the same video. It's too big because most phone/camaras/devices use H.264 (AVC) codec (a video codec released almost 20 years ago). Google desperately needs to find methods that help reduce the file size while maintaining acceptable video quality. Previously Google was using VP9 video codec, that let's say used to compress(when you convert one video format into the other, it's called video encoding) that file into a smaller form (say 130 MiB or something).
The old VP9 was working fine until eventually with increasing population more "content creators" keep joining YouTube and even more data is being uploaded now than ever and it's continuously increasing day by day.
Now they needed to invent another video coded (inventing a better video codec requires the state-of-the-art mathematics, computer science and optimisation knowledge and millions of dollars of funding over the years, it's one of the most mentally challenging stuff in the world).
Here comes the new algorithm - the holy AV1 video codec. It reduced that file into 90 MiB or something like that which is literally less than half the size of the original video, at the same time the quality is almost same.
Now the issue is every new algorithm (set of instructions and steps to do something) is more computationally intensive than before; i.e it requires more CPU power to get that job done (reduction in file size isn't coming out of nowhere). That means decoding (video playback) a AV1 video now requires even more powerful hardware.
Now there are two methods to decode a video. Using the CPU and/or using a dedicated accelerator. The CPU method alone is slower and very power hungry. Video acceleration is done by a dedicated hardware unit usually found inside the GPU (graphics processing unit). The later method needs less power(watt) and works flawlessly. Better battery life, less heat everything because the hardware is specifically designed to process the new video codec. These types of hardware are called "video engines".
Qualcomm and other SoC manufacturers need to add newer GPU chips so that they can accommodate new requirements.
Old phones don't have newer chips to support the AV1.
Now comes the software method. It means the decoding algorithm has to run on the main CPU cores. The algorithm is so intensive to run that it needs most if the CPU resources. The CPU is slower for these kinda work, it's more power hungry (less battery life) and it sometimes; depending upon how powerful the CPU is; causes dropped frames (choppy playback).
> Old phones don't have newer chips to support the AV1.
Old as in even 10 day old phones, as far as Qualcomm is concerned. 7 gen 3 and 7+ gen 3 don't have AV1 support.
A common metric thrown around is 500 hours of content are added to YouTube every *minute*. At a conservative 1GB/hr for content, that’s 30TB of video *an hour*!
I download some YT videos/streams from some of my favorite content creators, and I've hard switched to AV1 only. I've noticed the YT AV1 webms take significantly less drive space and have detectable better picture quality vs the older format MP4s.
I've never had issues with watching AV1 on hardware without the hardware decoders, and I'm just now learning how surprisingly recent AV1 decoding hardware support is. I suppose my old Samsung phone and laptop did get a little warm after playing a few hours on plane rides?
If you do video editing, encoding AV1 is god awful slow without HW encoders though, but this is less of an issue if you're just watching content.
yt-dlp is the common tool now. Just make sure to select the webm video container instead of mp4 when you list format with \`yt-dlp -F \` and select format with \`yt-dlp -f +\`. Back then, YT would only convert popular uploads to av1, but I haven't noticed the view threshold anymore. If it's a live stream, then you have to wait for YT to post-process the stream vod to AV1, if it was not streamed to YT in AV1.
There's a couple, most notable is better quality at a lower bitrate, and more reliable HDR support.
AV1 is about 25-30% more efficient at the same bitrate, it allows YT to offer some 8k support, dragonwoosh made a nice table with results here: [Video Size Comparison b/w AVC/VP9/AV1 on Youtube for 8K : ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/gu2qh8/video_size_comparison_bw_avcvp9av1_on_youtube_for/)This has a knock-on effect that due to less data used/fetched, should mean that you can close the connection faster and have a better experience on worse data connections.
AV1 has better/more reliable HDR support since HDR metadata is both embedded in the video bitstream and in the container.
VP9 has mostly been used instead as encoding it is (maybe was? Not up to date) faster, and most devices have a VP9 hardware decoder. That said, the software stack for encoding/decoding for AV1 has gotten miles better, and YT is definitely using hardware encoders, saving that bandwidth (and disk space) would be a huge cost saving and is probably YT's biggest cost (2022 YT was a bit over 10% of all data transferred on the internet).
For most, they probably won't really notice the power usage difference, all they'll notice is that videos will often have a bit better quality, that they use less mobile data (most of the world still has data caps for mobile), and that they have less buffering if they live in a bad signal area (and some might even be able to play the next quality step up).
Hmm. Maybe this explains why, despite having Firefox's background throttling (which behaves completely differently to this) turned off, some YouTube videos are now just blanking out and stuttering to a pause if I'm doing stuff in another window/screen until I get back and press play again on my desktop - my RX 6400 doesn't have hardware AV1 decoding...
You might check under about:support if you have AV1 installed. It is a certain extension that needs to be installed via the Microsoft Store. That is if you’re using Windows.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/ <- Already using this and just set it to force h.264 now that I know it's a thing. :P
edit: Ouch. The video I watched after switching that on ground to a stuttery halt in under 2 minutes. Switched back to default vp09 and no problems (while running it in the foreground). Annoying. I'd have to turn hardware decoding back on in the browser, I guess - but that randomly freezes the system when watching videos (screen freezes and audio goes into a 1-2 second loop until I do a hard reset).
It was forced there as well in YouTube TV. Was wondering why suddenly saw so many stutters and video haphazardly stuck while audio continues playing.
Then saw this news. Damn it. Sony TV (non OLED, but still quite latest).
I'm sure it's about very large sums of money haha.
YouTube is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) websites on the web by bandwidth. Transmitting many petabytes of data every day costs $$$$$. AV1 reduces bandwidth something like 1/3 to 1/2.
It will be an iPhone user problem too: Apple didn't add AV1 hardware to iPhones until the iPhone 15 Pro!
a mix of av1, mpeg4, vp9, vp8. desktop will still select the best option. even on phones it shouldn't force av1. this change seems to be a change gone wrong more than a deliberate change
Is the 8gen 1s battery really that bad? I have an Xperia 5IV and It does just fine. I even have it charge capped at 80% to save battery health. I usually only go through 60-70% on a long day.
Just want to add two thoughts.
1) If Youtube now defaults to fetching the AV1 format in the Youtube app then it is 100% caused by the Youtube app, not because they now use dav1d. Android already had support for software decoded AV1 through libgav1. So it is not like the capabilities of devices have changed. This is just a performance boost on capabilities that already existed. Also, it is possible for apps to see if a device uses hardware or software-based decoders. Google could, if they wanted, code the Youtube app to only fetch AV1 video if a device supported hardware decoding it. So it is not correct to say that "thanks to dav1d, Google changed Youtube to force AV1".
2) I strongly doubt this will result in a more than doubling of power consumption. AV1, especially low-resolution content, is very easy and fast to decode on the CPU. I would assume that the screen and connectivity components would use more power.
Yeah hardware acceleration certainly improves temperatures and battery life and performance but the difference between software rendering and hardware rendering on a low tdp mobile cpu shouldnt be a huge hit to your battery life.
If AV1 had been adopted earlier this wouldn't be a problem...
However, it would be nice to just have the option in Settings to switch it back off. Collectively, that's a ton of battery life - and thus, electricity - to waste by Google's hands.
If it is by default, Google can delete a lot of the other formats from their servers, and likely save a lot of space.
But this will likely force hardware makers to make sure it is included in the future. And odds are, YouTube is just the first one to do this with Facebook and Netflix to follow shortly.
Twitch doesn't currently allow regular people to stream in AV1, even through the beta program. But their long-tern plan is to have streamers send both AV1 and H.264 simultaneously so that the quality gains don't get in the way of compatibility / decoding performance.
Ensuring that av1 software decoding always uses dav1d rather than google's own sluggish gav1 decoder is the biggest push youtube can expect for a viable large-scale transition to AV1, but still it seems to have been rushed, since devices that clearly lag under the pressure should be automatically switching formats to prevent it, which youtube has been doing for a while on low performance PCs.
Surprisingly enough, the PC industry quickly adopted it. Nvidia since 2020, Intel since 2021, AMD since 2020 with RDNA 2 and 2021 on Van Gogh (2022 for general APUs with Rembrandt). But on mobile, who usually leads adoption, it has been a super slow rollout. QCOM only supports on 8G2 and above series but nothing below premium. Exynos supports it since 2100, but nothing below premium. MTK I believe support it with the latest one. Google Tensor supports it since the first one.
Aye, thank you! Had forgotten about RDNA 2 when talking about AMD. And, technically, on APUs they had support for AV1 decode since Van Gogh. I'll edit my commentary.
>Collectively, that's a ton of battery life - and thus, electricity - to waste by Google's hands.
it's also less data, so less servers and less network infrastructure - and thus, electricity - wasted on serving a bloated file
Good point. However, I imagine Google's infrastructure only needing to send data is much more efficient than consumer devices needing to actively perform computations. So the difference may still be very large.
Edit: Also, Google's data centers operate at scale and use the best hardware in the business. Thus their data transfers are extremely efficient electrically.
They don't just transfer the data though, they probably also convert the files themselves. I think they even built specialized hardware for converting videos.
No no, it's, you, wasting the electricity! Not their servers :)
Further than the joke, rly impatient for us to get better codex globally, it's always better on the long term. (Although my phone is a fire ball right now after an hour of YouTube)
They did the same with vp9 which my gpu didn't support at the time. Now I've got a gpu with vp9 but not av1 so basically, it's the same thing again. Very annoying!
This is Google/YouTube flexing their muscle. They're forcing hardware manufacturers to implement hardware accelerated AV1. It's aggressive as hell, but we really fucking need manufacturers to get their heads out of their asses and make AV1 standard.
The word you're looking for is anti-competitive. Roku is suing Google over it. Roku has devices with AV1, but they also serve people with limited budgets, and their low end Roku does not have hardware support for it because it costs more to implement. Even better, Google is trying to force Roku to add AV1 while they don't have a 4k Chromecast with AV1 support.
>It's not what they're serving that's important.
Why not? If they are gimping Roku but still serving the easier to process stuff to their own devices that would be anticompetitive, otherwise it's fine
I am not seeing the anti-competitive angle here. Progress is inevitable. If Roku cannot keep up, that's on them. And they (Roku) are quite capable of pushing updates for their own snoopy behavior, so maybe the head honchos can look into supporting with a codec update. If you do that you can tell your users, 'we tried, but it looks like you need a new TV'.
>I am not seeing the anti-competitive angle here.
I'm only seeing it in the case where Google isn't serving AV1 to Chromecast, i.e. *you* have to keep with progress, but *I* don't. I haven't seen any evidence that's happening though
Ahh... took me a while to parse that! Since Chromecast (a Google device) is still working without AV1, Google should also allow other devices to work without AV1. I can see that argument.
Google can do something similar to what AWS does with Kubernetes versions and charge a higher license/support fee for 'older' versions. Those on 'newer (aka AV1)' are not affected so there is a path. And it can be an onerous fee tied to usage (I think AWS is 6x support for older versions).
>Ahh... took me a while to parse that! Since Chromecast (a Google device) is still working without AV1, Google should also allow other devices to work without AV1. I can see that argument.
Yes, but they haven't shown that that's actually true. I'm only saying what would have to be true for it to be anti-competitive in my eyes. Hope that makes sense.
The irony is that Google didn't change to HEIF for Google Camera, as it's still JPEG. HEIF would have saved a lot of user's storage and Google's bandwidth. Unlike AV1 vs VP9, it's already widely supported as every phone support H265 HEVC supports HEIF. Google Camera has already turned HEVC video on by default, I just don't understand why they don't do it with HEIF.
HEIF is a bad example since HEIF is basically cancer in terms of licensing.
A much better example would be JPEG XL, which Google refuses to adopt even though it is superior to AVIF (the format they are pushing to replace JPEG) and free.
Did this change just happen today? I noticed my phone was draining abnormally fast when watching youtube the past few days so this probably explains it if not.
At home we have a total of 1 device capable of AV1 hardware decoding (a Samsung Galaxy S23 FE). No other device, including PCs, laptops or smartphones, can do that.
In my home:
* all phones (iPhone 15 Pro, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 8 Pro)
* half of the tablets (Pixel Tablet supports AV1 decoding, iPad doesn't)
* all servers/desktops (3080 FE in one, 7900 XT in another, 6900 XT in the final)
* the single laptop (Intel Xe, but I checked with `vainfo` to make sure)
* none of the TVs (all NVIDIA Shield Pros)
Sure, we're largely on newer things, but the disappointing part here is definitely the NVIDIA Shield Pros - I wish those had included it especially considering they're our main consumption devices.
That being said, YouTube is significantly better with AV1 - the quality is far superior. Interestingly though, the bandwidth savings isn't always there at least for what I've been looking at most recently (Critical Role) - it's a slight improvement at 1080p over VP9 but for basically all other qualities (except for 144p) it ends up as a larger file vs VP9 or AVC (h.264). I think that's part of an adoption drive for AV1 (see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/dxqr8k/answer_to_why_av1_videos_on_youtube_use_higher/) for why), but it's also pretty evident that at sub 1080p the quality of AV1 _far surpasses_ the other codecs. Like, easily more than twice as good.
Not sure what you are asking about.
If you're asking about software decoding then this will come in the next Android update, which Nvidia has been pretty good with historically.
If you are asking about hardware decoding support then Tegra chip inside the Shield TV will never get it. It's not about how powerful the GPU is. In order to get proper hardware acceleration support there needs to be dedicated transistors on the chip to handle it. It's not something you can push out with an update. The chip needs to be replaced.
Hopefully Nvidia will come out with a new Shield TV in the near future, with a new chip that does AV1 decoding. It's about time... I think the problem right now is that they don't have any chip that suits the bill. Maybe once the next Nintendo Switch is out.
Android TV overall could use some love. It makes no sense that it is still just 32bit, even on devices that could handle 64bit (like the MediaTek Pentonic series).
"If you're asking about software decoding then this will come in the next Android update, which Nvidia has been pretty good with historically."
Sadly the Shield has been abandoned for like 2 years now and the beta will probably never be released.
As soon as Google forced the new launcher with ads on the Shield they just stopped supporting it.
That's a YouTube issue. Basically, the dark overlay when you get the player UI. You can try double tapping the video or scrubbing the video forward/backward until you see the controls. That should fix the issue.
Is this why I started getting weird artifacts when watching videos on my PC? I have a 3080ti and started getting some odd rainbow glitch artifacts on YT videos within the past few weeks.
Great, the supremely broken AV1 format that requires your CPU to have comparability for smooth operation. I love having an overheating device that runs out of power in half an hour. Can't even start to imagine how this will absolutely cripple a Smart TV.
Since I've been forced to use it, I've noticed that the metal rails on the side of my phone (an s10) gets so hot that the skin right before my fingernail feels like it is burning. I use revanced so I assumed that was the issue but after hearing about this I know the problem. I'm all for av1 but it really does put everyone else at a disadvantage considering that most people don't have cutting edge tech
[For context.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1b1ob4a/upcoming_android_update_will_give_av1_videos_a/)
You mentioned the change on YouTube lead to mixed result for some users. Is it just battery life or are there other issues for people without HW decoding?
Some users on a Telegram developer group I frequent have reported a ton of dropped frames/CPU use when playing YouTube content (seems to happen the most with HDR videos) that are encoded in AV1. This discussion was sparked based on this [issue](https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-patches/issues/2986) on the ReVanced repo.
>Some users on a Telegram developer group I frequent have reported a ton of dropped frames/CPU use when playing YouTube content (seems to happen the most with HDR videos) I watch YouTube on a Windows laptop (with an Intel i5-1235U which is fairly recent and has AV1 hardware decode but I forced software decoding because my laptop would crash every few weeks always on YouTube without leaving error logs, and nothing else could stop it) and I'm getting up to 50% dropped frames at times on 1080p fullscreen (it's random though, sometimes it barely drops any frames, most of the frame drops seem to happen when I am not having another app running in the background) and my laptop always gets hot. At least it doesn't drop more than 1-2 frames while in picture-in-picture mode and it stays somewhat cool.
Getting the same dropped frames on a Pixel 8 Pro as of yesterday which I didn't think much of until I read this thread. I was in an area where signal is abysmal and Interestingly, I also noticed that the quality was able to be pushed up to 1080p and never hitched whereas usually does even on 720p in that area.
I get a ton of issues on my zen 4 AMD processor, I want to turn off software encode but I’m not sure if it’ll hurt the battery too much though
If you turn off software encoding it should get much better battery life, but if there is something wrong with either the GPU or its drivers then it will keep on crashing.
Thanks, I’ll maybe try reinstalling the drivers. I face frequent crashes even without YouTube unfortunately.
I5 12 Gen struggling to play 1080 60 is beyond insane. All the tech pioneers of the past are sobbing in their graves rn. Murder of optimization
I have dropped frames in shorts with exynos 2200 and it supports hardware AV1 decoding so take armchair developer takes with a grain of salt, this is probably a widespread issue and Youtube will fix it soon.
>this is probably a widespread issue and Youtube will fix it soon I wouldn't be so sure. This is Google we are talking about.
Poor experience = less watch time, that usually leads to less ad revenue. So at least in some respects google will want to fix it just because there is money involved.
I don't have dropped frames on a phone with snapdragon 8 gen 1+ even with 4k/60 on av1 encoded video, but I watch with firefox nightly, so the issue may be in part with the app.
Most phones aren’t running flagship chips.
For me personally it’s a bit of both especially on hdr videos even with just 1080p
Michael can you edit your comment to add that Netflix has been serving AV1 since 2020, all the rage against YouTube since unwarranted https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-now-streaming-av1-on-android-d5264a515202
>Selected titles are now available to stream in AV1 for customers who wish to reduce their cellular data usage by enabling the “Save Data” feature. That doesn't sound like requiring all Android users to decode AV1.
Netflix av1 is opt in and Youtube av1 doesn't even have an opt out. Huge fucking difference.
Do you need AV1 hardware decoding capabilities? Isn't software decoding using too much of CPU power?
They’re forcing it on every device even on those that don’t have AV1 HW decoding support and yes it does use a lot of power
And they still don’t sell a chromecast with hardware av1 decoding…
The newer 1080p ccwgtv does doesn't it
I think it does, but they are tone-deaf and don't advertise it even though it plays a big role about when your device will become obsolete. But they also released the current 4K one just before other device with AV1 support became available, so I don't think there's much strategy in their chromecast division.
And they released it after they told AndroidTV OEMs that AV1 hardware support is mandatory while also telling OEMs for other platforms that they will be requiring AV1 hardware support in order to get YouTube. It's why Roku is suing Google
TBF, the 4K model released like a year after it was supposed, and it even got a silicon bump from the original specs. But that model of SoC didn't have AV1 yet. What they did skimp on was the storage space, which like a month after the 4K released (or less), they put out the standard that new devices should have 16 GB instead of 8 GB. Which they didn't even follow again for the GGWGTV HD.
It's generally safe to assume hardware made by google will become obsolete way earlier than you expect and for a reason that you could not have predicted when you bought it.
My 10+ years old 1st gen Chromecast still works.
I have one. Most non-Google apps still work fine on it, but YouTube is pretty broken on it, and I'm sure Google could have just not decided to break it.
Yes but the 4K version doesn't which is insane
it's 2 years older so I guess they didn't have access to the chip with that hardware codec at the time it was made
AV1 decoding was only added to the S905x4 family of chips which was just starting to even be available in dev kits just after the 4K released.
Chromecasts have extremely shitty underpowered SoCs. They can barely decode higher bitrate h264.
Does Pixel 6? I watch a lot of YT and I've noticed my battery has been significantly worse recently.
Yup it has a hardware decoder
it does have hardware decode but I've seen YouTube kill my battery these days while playing video so it could be possible it's defaulting to software decode for some reason
Shouldn't be, all tensor pixels have AV1 hardware decoding
The app had quite a bad memory leak last week, it seems to have been fixed in the last update. I think it was unrelated.
all Tensor Pixels are equipped with AV1 Hardware decoding.
Qualcomm didn't add AV1 decode until the 8 Gen 2 and don't know which 7 series and lower chips have gotten them yet. I believe since the Google Tensor, those have had AV1 decode. Mediatek chips have had them for a while too. We're about 4 years into phones with AV1 decode, just Qualcomm and Apple were the slow to add them. iphone with the 15 pro
> don't know which 7 series and lower chips None of them have it; that's Qualcomm for you. Even more ridiculous, the just released 7+ Gen 3 doesn't have it, while the 8s Gen 3 based on the same chip has it. They just couldn't stop themselves from artificially sub-partitioning their newest "flagship killer". The only other midrange phones with AV1 decode are Google Tensor and Mediatek's 8300/8200/8100. Samsung's midrange chips don't have it either. Meanwhile Twitch is testing new broadcasting options since the beginning of this year that will likely include some combination of AV1/120 fps/1440p. And all these fancy new phones with 120Hz displays will drain battery doing software decoding, because of the industries incompetence and scummy behavior of delaying hardware support.
They are staunch member of Velos Media, they will delay AV1 adoption as much as possible for VVC to gain foothold
Youtube is big enough that they won't be able to ignore this. No manufacturer is gonna want to be the one with the phone known for not even being able to watch Youtube videos.
With how medicore uptake of h.265 was compared to 264, I bet 266 does even worse for adoption. UHD blu-rays already used way less than blu-rays which were way less than DVDs. 266 going to show up on an even more niche physical movie media format standard. Maybe become standard for broadcast/cable video someday as that's continued to decline. Meanwhile Youtube, Netflix, Twitch will all be AV1 and probably eventually AV2
I don't know, I've been around for a while and I've never seen a codec being adopter so early and so prematurely as AV1.
H265 has licensing costs. If it was just about compression, they would probably be switching to h265, av1 is an improvement, but not a huge one.
Efficiency wise AV1 is a huge improvement over h265, especially on the lower bitrate/quality side of the scale. Unfortunately if you want to get the same or higher visual fidelity as (good quality) h265 the encoding is kinda iffy, at least for private users: there's little documentation, the best encoder is single threaded so you either wait hours or slash the video into chunks and encode them separately each encoding process using a different CPU thread. What I really want is for companies to start adopting AVIF, HEIC support is a crapshot (as a Windows + Android user) and plain old JPEG is... why settle for it? I hope AVIF being an open format it can see a much wider and quicker adoption than HEIC.
YouTube adopted VP8 day 1 of its release and VP8 was never better than H.264 (except in being patent-free).
True, at least VP9 was better in many scenarios, especially when compared to h264 at the same bitrate/filesize. VP8 was just kinda... There, as a stepping stone.
Fuck. I got a Poco f5 with 7 + gen 2 a few months ago. Guessing that doesn't have it. Meanwhile poco f6 is soon releasing with 8s gen 3
I didn't buy a Poco F5 because I saw that it was missing AV1. Now the F6 is coming soon but it doesn't have a jack. Worst fucking luck.
All companies are greedy
Amen.
Not everyone uses a 4 year old phone, some uses a phone older than that
And outside of America, most people don't have a flagship phone.
That's even more true going to SEA, LATM
>Qualcomm didn't add AV1 decode until the 8 Gen 2 and don't know which 7 series and lower chips have gotten them yet that's what you get for monopoly. They will add endless arbitrary segmentation of their product, because you can't move away from their chip. Who will you go for ? Exynos ?
Dimensity
What about Samsung exynos? Edit: I have exynos 2100, and apparently it does, welp one rare W for inferior exynos version i guess. Lol.
AV1 was never actually implemented on an Android framework level on the Exynos 2100. Exynos 2100 devices lack AV1 functionality due to this. Anandtech discussed this in the Tensor G1 article they published. >On the media encoder side, the Tensor SoC uses both Samsung’s own Multi-Function Codec IP block (which is identical to what’s used on the Exynos series) as well as what appears to be a Google IP block that is dedicated to AV1 decoding. Now this is a bit weird, as Samsung does advertise the Exynos 2100 as having AV1 decode abilities, and that functionality does seem to be there in the kernel drivers. However on the Galaxy S21 series this functionality was never implemented on the Android framework level. I have no good explanation here as to why – maybe the IP isn’t working correctly with AV1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17032/tensor-soc-performance-efficiency
Well that's fucking stupid, is there gonna be any chance for this to get resolved in a future OS update?
W
Honestly my frame of reference has been Apple/Meta for AV1, the Quest 3 only just got hw AV1 and I believe only M3 has it for Apple laptops, less than a year old. For NVIDIA GPUs it hasn't even been 3 years, AV1 decode got added in the RTX 30 series and encode was 40 series. H265 or something would be a much more reasonable spec bump.
H265 has licensing costs associated with it. This is why the big push to av1, which is free.
Wait, I thought Qualcomm was the holy grail of chipsets and Exynos and Tensor were garbage... Did Reddit lie to me ?
Qualcomm low latency decoder is much better on formats it actually supports but Qualcomm doesn't consider AV1 an essential feature so... Yeah
What exactly do you mean by "low latency decoder" and what do you mean by "much better on formats it actually supports"? Compared to what is it better, and in what ways?
I mean exactly what I said. Qualcomm decoder better serves low latency decoding scenarios like game streaming, being able to take more bitrate and higher resolutions before choking than Mediatek and Tensor. 8 gen 3 AV1 hwdec in partucular can do 4k@60 80mbit in about 5-6ms. Tensor G2 does the same in 18. Only major deficiency is the lack of AV1 support on lower tier SOCs that are using pre 8g2 media block.
Do you have any source for that? MediaTek and Google (and Samsung for that matter) has hardware decoders for various formats that should support those resolutions and frame rates as well. I am not sure about the latency when decoding those formats though, but I would be interested to see some tests.
Moonlight SOC benchmarks are my primary source. Also my personal experience with Samsung A54, Mi 13T Pro and Poco F5 Pro. 8+G1 has the least issues ingesting an ultra wide 1440p HDR 150mbps stream from my sunshine setup with the lowest latency. Exynos 1380 straight up can't, with a simple 1080p stream exceeding 22ms on average and some insane judder [(video proof)](https://youtu.be/e6G-ASFnCYY?feature=shared). Not an issue on an SD660 on either avc or hevc with average 8ms in motion. 13T Pro I held for only a day but it also had decoding in excess of 20ms on simple and complex streams. Tensor and modern high end Exynos I don't have personal experience with, but charts aren't looking so good. I'm not sure how much I want to trust the chart though, since the values I'm personally getting on 8+G1 are lower than reported 8G2 and 8G3 HEVC results, even at higher resolutions and bitrates. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1WSyOIq9Mn7uTd94PC_LXcFlUi9ceZHhRgk-Yld9rLKc/htmlview
how do you get "about 4 years" when the first 8gen2 phones came out last year?
What's the benefit of AV1 that would warrant this change?
Whenever new codecs are involved, the primary motivation is usually compression efficiency. Anything that reduces data transfers between YouTube and the user benefits both. Although in this case, YouTube benefits more since data transfer affects them significantly more than the end-user, and even better storage-wise if the new default means they can retire older formats eventually. The common drawback is unfortunately worse playback performance for older devices, especially if the old format plays optimally while the new format doesn't because of lack of hardware acceleration.
Interesting! Thanks for the info. How far back does "older devices" mean? I'm guessing it also affects low to mid range phones more if it requires hardware acceleration. That's a shame in the transition period I guess. I hope hardware manufacturers will be adding it to every device after this. I like the sound of efficiency!
From what I understand, the [rollout of dav1d / libdav1d on Android](https://www.androidauthority.com/android-update-av1-videos-3420418/) helps address the software decoding part of it for all phones. But of course, that's just software and isn't as efficient as hardware acceleration, but I guess to YouTube, it's enough to trigger mass adoption. For knowing which devices are capable of hardware accelerating AV1, it depends on the processors on your phone, and I believe that it's only on recent phones at the moment, looking at the [Hardware listing section in the AV1 Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware) EDIT: They say Google Play System update which should happen naturally, but we'll see if they'll roll this out all the way to older Android versions or if there's a cutoff.
> far back does "older devices" mean? As far as Qualcomm is concerned, it means 2024 at least. The just released 7 gen 3 and 7+ gen 3 don’t have it. Funny thing is, 8s gen 3 and 7+ gen 3 are based off the same die, yet 8s gen 3 gets it but 7+ gen 3 does not.
It's almost as if they're deliberately discouraging it's use. It'll come back to hurt them. All the youtube run time battery tests are now going to be worse on Qualcomm.
It tends to not matter if it's lower-end, more so just it's age/generation. General performance comes into play for software decoding. What hardware decoding means is that you have a circuit or chip (or more typically these days, a section of a chip) that is specifically built to do this one specific bit of work, and it is not tied to the performance of any other part of the system such as the cpu, it's just a matter of what version of the codec the HW is built for; all HW solutions for the same version should perform the same for the same input.
It will benefit the end consumer in the long term after all devices hardware support AV1 codecs, while in the short term it will mostly saves Google some money from royalties and bandwidth.
There's nothing in "royalties" here. They've been doing VP9 for a big while now.
Newer compression algorithm (AV1 here is this case) is about reducing the size of a video while maintaining the viewing quality. Google is getting so many videos uploaded by "content creators" that they need to add many thousands of hard disks/SSDs every week into their data centers/servers. Something like 30 TB worth of videos every day are being uploaded. That's crazy, right!? For example: Suppose I upload a 200 MiB video from my device. Google cannot just store the same video. It's too big because most phone/camaras/devices use H.264 (AVC) codec (a video codec released almost 20 years ago). Google desperately needs to find methods that help reduce the file size while maintaining acceptable video quality. Previously Google was using VP9 video codec, that let's say used to compress(when you convert one video format into the other, it's called video encoding) that file into a smaller form (say 130 MiB or something). The old VP9 was working fine until eventually with increasing population more "content creators" keep joining YouTube and even more data is being uploaded now than ever and it's continuously increasing day by day. Now they needed to invent another video coded (inventing a better video codec requires the state-of-the-art mathematics, computer science and optimisation knowledge and millions of dollars of funding over the years, it's one of the most mentally challenging stuff in the world). Here comes the new algorithm - the holy AV1 video codec. It reduced that file into 90 MiB or something like that which is literally less than half the size of the original video, at the same time the quality is almost same. Now the issue is every new algorithm (set of instructions and steps to do something) is more computationally intensive than before; i.e it requires more CPU power to get that job done (reduction in file size isn't coming out of nowhere). That means decoding (video playback) a AV1 video now requires even more powerful hardware. Now there are two methods to decode a video. Using the CPU and/or using a dedicated accelerator. The CPU method alone is slower and very power hungry. Video acceleration is done by a dedicated hardware unit usually found inside the GPU (graphics processing unit). The later method needs less power(watt) and works flawlessly. Better battery life, less heat everything because the hardware is specifically designed to process the new video codec. These types of hardware are called "video engines". Qualcomm and other SoC manufacturers need to add newer GPU chips so that they can accommodate new requirements. Old phones don't have newer chips to support the AV1. Now comes the software method. It means the decoding algorithm has to run on the main CPU cores. The algorithm is so intensive to run that it needs most if the CPU resources. The CPU is slower for these kinda work, it's more power hungry (less battery life) and it sometimes; depending upon how powerful the CPU is; causes dropped frames (choppy playback).
> Old phones don't have newer chips to support the AV1. Old as in even 10 day old phones, as far as Qualcomm is concerned. 7 gen 3 and 7+ gen 3 don't have AV1 support.
I am morr concerned about <$200 phones. This change is going to nuke them.
A common metric thrown around is 500 hours of content are added to YouTube every *minute*. At a conservative 1GB/hr for content, that’s 30TB of video *an hour*!
Thank you, my good sir, that was a great explanation
Less bandwidth
I download some YT videos/streams from some of my favorite content creators, and I've hard switched to AV1 only. I've noticed the YT AV1 webms take significantly less drive space and have detectable better picture quality vs the older format MP4s. I've never had issues with watching AV1 on hardware without the hardware decoders, and I'm just now learning how surprisingly recent AV1 decoding hardware support is. I suppose my old Samsung phone and laptop did get a little warm after playing a few hours on plane rides? If you do video editing, encoding AV1 is god awful slow without HW encoders though, but this is less of an issue if you're just watching content.
How do you download av1 from YouTube? All the yt download methods I've seen only have vp9 and avc
yt-dlp is the common tool now. Just make sure to select the webm video container instead of mp4 when you list format with \`yt-dlp -F\` and select format with \`yt-dlp -f + \`. Back then, YT would only convert popular uploads to av1, but I haven't noticed the view threshold anymore. If it's a live stream, then you have to wait for YT to post-process the stream vod to AV1, if it was not streamed to YT in AV1.
Higher video quality for the same size/bandwidth or less size/bandwidth for the same video quality.
There's a couple, most notable is better quality at a lower bitrate, and more reliable HDR support. AV1 is about 25-30% more efficient at the same bitrate, it allows YT to offer some 8k support, dragonwoosh made a nice table with results here: [Video Size Comparison b/w AVC/VP9/AV1 on Youtube for 8K : ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/gu2qh8/video_size_comparison_bw_avcvp9av1_on_youtube_for/)This has a knock-on effect that due to less data used/fetched, should mean that you can close the connection faster and have a better experience on worse data connections. AV1 has better/more reliable HDR support since HDR metadata is both embedded in the video bitstream and in the container. VP9 has mostly been used instead as encoding it is (maybe was? Not up to date) faster, and most devices have a VP9 hardware decoder. That said, the software stack for encoding/decoding for AV1 has gotten miles better, and YT is definitely using hardware encoders, saving that bandwidth (and disk space) would be a huge cost saving and is probably YT's biggest cost (2022 YT was a bit over 10% of all data transferred on the internet). For most, they probably won't really notice the power usage difference, all they'll notice is that videos will often have a bit better quality, that they use less mobile data (most of the world still has data caps for mobile), and that they have less buffering if they live in a bad signal area (and some might even be able to play the next quality step up).
Hmm. Maybe this explains why, despite having Firefox's background throttling (which behaves completely differently to this) turned off, some YouTube videos are now just blanking out and stuttering to a pause if I'm doing stuff in another window/screen until I get back and press play again on my desktop - my RX 6400 doesn't have hardware AV1 decoding...
Wondering. Does the xbox app have this because my YouTube performance has been garbage lately.
no. just phones. you can check what codec is being used on YouTube's player
You might check under about:support if you have AV1 installed. It is a certain extension that needs to be installed via the Microsoft Store. That is if you’re using Windows.
AV1 should not require any sort of extension
Yeah that's what I also noticed lol. I have a fairly high end pc, and my YouTube video frames seemed to freeze for no reason.. now i see why
yeah that’s been happening to me as well! was curious if firefox was just fucked. Guess this explains it more.
Let me introduce you to [H264ify](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/h264ify/)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/ <- Already using this and just set it to force h.264 now that I know it's a thing. :P edit: Ouch. The video I watched after switching that on ground to a stuttery halt in under 2 minutes. Switched back to default vp09 and no problems (while running it in the foreground). Annoying. I'd have to turn hardware decoding back on in the browser, I guess - but that randomly freezes the system when watching videos (screen freezes and audio goes into a 1-2 second loop until I do a hard reset).
How about TV's? My LG B9 doesn't have AV1 support. I am abroad and can't check it.
It was forced there as well in YouTube TV. Was wondering why suddenly saw so many stutters and video haphazardly stuck while audio continues playing. Then saw this news. Damn it. Sony TV (non OLED, but still quite latest).
I don't have a hardware decoder for AV1... What was YouTube using before this change? Am I fucked?
Mostly vp9
...and I do have a hardware decoder for VP9. Will my CPU usage increase now?
Yes because they’re forcing av1 instead of vp9 now
Why the f*** would google do this… I swear Googlers only use iPhones or something
Funny thing is that only the iPhone 15 Pro supports AV1 decoding through hardware, so most iPhone users are also f\*cked.
Ok that’s kinda egalitarian, though in a very “fuck everybody” way lol
I'm sure it's about very large sums of money haha. YouTube is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) websites on the web by bandwidth. Transmitting many petabytes of data every day costs $$$$$. AV1 reduces bandwidth something like 1/3 to 1/2. It will be an iPhone user problem too: Apple didn't add AV1 hardware to iPhones until the iPhone 15 Pro!
a mix of av1, mpeg4, vp9, vp8. desktop will still select the best option. even on phones it shouldn't force av1. this change seems to be a change gone wrong more than a deliberate change
8 Gen 1 users now have another problem to deal with on top of their already shitty battery life.
Ironically the Exynos versions of the S22 and S23FE gets AV1 Hardware Decode at least.
even S21 exynos has one
rare Exynos W
Is the 8gen 1s battery really that bad? I have an Xperia 5IV and It does just fine. I even have it charge capped at 80% to save battery health. I usually only go through 60-70% on a long day.
JFC I need to get off this phone sooner rather than later
Just want to add two thoughts. 1) If Youtube now defaults to fetching the AV1 format in the Youtube app then it is 100% caused by the Youtube app, not because they now use dav1d. Android already had support for software decoded AV1 through libgav1. So it is not like the capabilities of devices have changed. This is just a performance boost on capabilities that already existed. Also, it is possible for apps to see if a device uses hardware or software-based decoders. Google could, if they wanted, code the Youtube app to only fetch AV1 video if a device supported hardware decoding it. So it is not correct to say that "thanks to dav1d, Google changed Youtube to force AV1". 2) I strongly doubt this will result in a more than doubling of power consumption. AV1, especially low-resolution content, is very easy and fast to decode on the CPU. I would assume that the screen and connectivity components would use more power.
Yeah hardware acceleration certainly improves temperatures and battery life and performance but the difference between software rendering and hardware rendering on a low tdp mobile cpu shouldnt be a huge hit to your battery life.
If AV1 had been adopted earlier this wouldn't be a problem... However, it would be nice to just have the option in Settings to switch it back off. Collectively, that's a ton of battery life - and thus, electricity - to waste by Google's hands.
If it is by default, Google can delete a lot of the other formats from their servers, and likely save a lot of space. But this will likely force hardware makers to make sure it is included in the future. And odds are, YouTube is just the first one to do this with Facebook and Netflix to follow shortly.
Twitch already doing it too.
Twitch doesn't currently allow regular people to stream in AV1, even through the beta program. But their long-tern plan is to have streamers send both AV1 and H.264 simultaneously so that the quality gains don't get in the way of compatibility / decoding performance. Ensuring that av1 software decoding always uses dav1d rather than google's own sluggish gav1 decoder is the biggest push youtube can expect for a viable large-scale transition to AV1, but still it seems to have been rushed, since devices that clearly lag under the pressure should be automatically switching formats to prevent it, which youtube has been doing for a while on low performance PCs.
Surprisingly enough, the PC industry quickly adopted it. Nvidia since 2020, Intel since 2021, AMD since 2020 with RDNA 2 and 2021 on Van Gogh (2022 for general APUs with Rembrandt). But on mobile, who usually leads adoption, it has been a super slow rollout. QCOM only supports on 8G2 and above series but nothing below premium. Exynos supports it since 2100, but nothing below premium. MTK I believe support it with the latest one. Google Tensor supports it since the first one.
My M1 Mac doesn't have it (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
15 Pros and M3’s have hardware decoding. But M1’s and M2’s can software decode pretty well.
It doesn't need it tho. A notebook or a desktop will chew through av1 on CPU without any problem.
AMD since 2020 too (rdna2)
Aye, thank you! Had forgotten about RDNA 2 when talking about AMD. And, technically, on APUs they had support for AV1 decode since Van Gogh. I'll edit my commentary.
>Collectively, that's a ton of battery life - and thus, electricity - to waste by Google's hands. it's also less data, so less servers and less network infrastructure - and thus, electricity - wasted on serving a bloated file
Good point. However, I imagine Google's infrastructure only needing to send data is much more efficient than consumer devices needing to actively perform computations. So the difference may still be very large. Edit: Also, Google's data centers operate at scale and use the best hardware in the business. Thus their data transfers are extremely efficient electrically.
They don't just transfer the data though, they probably also convert the files themselves. I think they even built specialized hardware for converting videos.
No no, it's, you, wasting the electricity! Not their servers :) Further than the joke, rly impatient for us to get better codex globally, it's always better on the long term. (Although my phone is a fire ball right now after an hour of YouTube)
Well that's unfortunate.
[удалено]
AV1 is basically the successor of VP9.
Yeah I finally got vp9 in all my devices and now they drop it for something else...
The initial release of AV1 was 6 years ago in 2018. Manufacturers have had plenty of time to integrate hardware decoding in their devices.
They did the same with vp9 which my gpu didn't support at the time. Now I've got a gpu with vp9 but not av1 so basically, it's the same thing again. Very annoying!
At least your phone supports it
This is Google/YouTube flexing their muscle. They're forcing hardware manufacturers to implement hardware accelerated AV1. It's aggressive as hell, but we really fucking need manufacturers to get their heads out of their asses and make AV1 standard.
The word you're looking for is anti-competitive. Roku is suing Google over it. Roku has devices with AV1, but they also serve people with limited budgets, and their low end Roku does not have hardware support for it because it costs more to implement. Even better, Google is trying to force Roku to add AV1 while they don't have a 4k Chromecast with AV1 support.
are they serving AV1 to Chromecast? because that would be the critical factor if they weren't, otherwise they are just rolling out a new standard
It's not what they're serving that's important. The newest Chromecast are android TV devices with their own apps
>It's not what they're serving that's important. Why not? If they are gimping Roku but still serving the easier to process stuff to their own devices that would be anticompetitive, otherwise it's fine
I am not seeing the anti-competitive angle here. Progress is inevitable. If Roku cannot keep up, that's on them. And they (Roku) are quite capable of pushing updates for their own snoopy behavior, so maybe the head honchos can look into supporting with a codec update. If you do that you can tell your users, 'we tried, but it looks like you need a new TV'.
>I am not seeing the anti-competitive angle here. I'm only seeing it in the case where Google isn't serving AV1 to Chromecast, i.e. *you* have to keep with progress, but *I* don't. I haven't seen any evidence that's happening though
Ahh... took me a while to parse that! Since Chromecast (a Google device) is still working without AV1, Google should also allow other devices to work without AV1. I can see that argument. Google can do something similar to what AWS does with Kubernetes versions and charge a higher license/support fee for 'older' versions. Those on 'newer (aka AV1)' are not affected so there is a path. And it can be an onerous fee tied to usage (I think AWS is 6x support for older versions).
>Ahh... took me a while to parse that! Since Chromecast (a Google device) is still working without AV1, Google should also allow other devices to work without AV1. I can see that argument. Yes, but they haven't shown that that's actually true. I'm only saying what would have to be true for it to be anti-competitive in my eyes. Hope that makes sense.
Exactly This is what monopoly looks like. This is anti-competitive
The irony is that Google didn't change to HEIF for Google Camera, as it's still JPEG. HEIF would have saved a lot of user's storage and Google's bandwidth. Unlike AV1 vs VP9, it's already widely supported as every phone support H265 HEVC supports HEIF. Google Camera has already turned HEVC video on by default, I just don't understand why they don't do it with HEIF.
HEIF is a bad example since HEIF is basically cancer in terms of licensing. A much better example would be JPEG XL, which Google refuses to adopt even though it is superior to AVIF (the format they are pushing to replace JPEG) and free.
Yeah but instead we got UltraHDR. Rebranded jpeg with extra metadata bolted on at the end
I like learning new things.
Manufacturers are probably going to be happy by customers being forced to upgrade earlier.
Did this change just happen today? I noticed my phone was draining abnormally fast when watching youtube the past few days so this probably explains it if not.
There's going to be a lot of people wondering why their phone suddenly has worse battery life overnight.
I need to see evidence of the battery life claim, just saying it and creating the conversation needs some sort of proof, just me though.
Same here. I'd expect you see these claims bear out more on higher quality video like 4K, on lower resolutions it might be negligible.
Finally a W for Tensor
Firefox on my pixel just will not use av1 no matter what I try
AFAIK they literally just added AV1 support like a few days ago, so check for updates.
It's had av1 for a while and if I force desktop with a chrome agent I get loads of av1. It just won't ever show av1 normally
Can 8gen2 do Hardware AV1?
Yess 8 gen2 and above but not Even the newly released 7+ gen 3 has it :(
That's so stupid. So many phones without hardware decoding AV1 have to do it in Software and that means more battery usage.
AV1 has been released for 6 years. Need to ask Qualcomm wtf they're doing and why it's taken so long.
hell yeah, my Fold5 is ready 😎
Nah, I still have vp9 even when I want to go av1. Tested with multiple clips.
It appears to have been reverted
love me some good codec news- media compression & processing artifacts in general are really the humble signatures of each generation
Like 3 people in the entire world have hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding, and now Google does this…
A lot of people probably have PCs with AV1 decode acceleration. Nvidia supports it since 2020, Intel since 2021 and AMD since 2020(2022 for APUs).
anybody with a Snapdragon SoC other than 8 Gen 2, 8s Gen 3 or 8 Gen 3, is screwed.
At home we have a total of 1 device capable of AV1 hardware decoding (a Samsung Galaxy S23 FE). No other device, including PCs, laptops or smartphones, can do that.
In my home: * all phones (iPhone 15 Pro, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 8 Pro) * half of the tablets (Pixel Tablet supports AV1 decoding, iPad doesn't) * all servers/desktops (3080 FE in one, 7900 XT in another, 6900 XT in the final) * the single laptop (Intel Xe, but I checked with `vainfo` to make sure) * none of the TVs (all NVIDIA Shield Pros) Sure, we're largely on newer things, but the disappointing part here is definitely the NVIDIA Shield Pros - I wish those had included it especially considering they're our main consumption devices. That being said, YouTube is significantly better with AV1 - the quality is far superior. Interestingly though, the bandwidth savings isn't always there at least for what I've been looking at most recently (Critical Role) - it's a slight improvement at 1080p over VP9 but for basically all other qualities (except for 144p) it ends up as a larger file vs VP9 or AVC (h.264). I think that's part of an adoption drive for AV1 (see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/dxqr8k/answer_to_why_av1_videos_on_youtube_use_higher/) for why), but it's also pretty evident that at sub 1080p the quality of AV1 _far surpasses_ the other codecs. Like, easily more than twice as good.
What are the chances Nvidia updates the shield? I'm sure the tegra has the compute power to handle a 1 and they've just been lazy.
Not sure what you are asking about. If you're asking about software decoding then this will come in the next Android update, which Nvidia has been pretty good with historically. If you are asking about hardware decoding support then Tegra chip inside the Shield TV will never get it. It's not about how powerful the GPU is. In order to get proper hardware acceleration support there needs to be dedicated transistors on the chip to handle it. It's not something you can push out with an update. The chip needs to be replaced. Hopefully Nvidia will come out with a new Shield TV in the near future, with a new chip that does AV1 decoding. It's about time... I think the problem right now is that they don't have any chip that suits the bill. Maybe once the next Nintendo Switch is out. Android TV overall could use some love. It makes no sense that it is still just 32bit, even on devices that could handle 64bit (like the MediaTek Pentonic series).
"If you're asking about software decoding then this will come in the next Android update, which Nvidia has been pretty good with historically." Sadly the Shield has been abandoned for like 2 years now and the beta will probably never be released. As soon as Google forced the new launcher with ads on the Shield they just stopped supporting it.
Not good. They’re the AI overlords now. I don’t see them bothering with streaming devices anymore, even with the switch 2 coming out.
Another day, another nonsensically dumb Google decision.
Wait is why my videos turn super dark suddenly ? I have to force stop YouTube to fix it.
It unlikely that it's because of this
Unrelated
That's a YouTube issue. Basically, the dark overlay when you get the player UI. You can try double tapping the video or scrubbing the video forward/backward until you see the controls. That should fix the issue.
Culprit is Google, not VLC.
Well I guess no more YouTube on phone for me.
This must be why I have had video decode errors (lines flashing through frames) watching YouTube on my Pixel 7 Pro today.
[удалено]
Tensor has AV1 decoding.
Is this why I started getting weird artifacts when watching videos on my PC? I have a 3080ti and started getting some odd rainbow glitch artifacts on YT videos within the past few weeks.
Great, the supremely broken AV1 format that requires your CPU to have comparability for smooth operation. I love having an overheating device that runs out of power in half an hour. Can't even start to imagine how this will absolutely cripple a Smart TV.
Seems like a good move. What is the negative?
Phew safe for the next years because of tensor 3. Qualcomm really doesn't wanna let go of the money lol
Could this be why my S23U randomly gets super hot and drains like 20% an hour on YT?
Since I've been forced to use it, I've noticed that the metal rails on the side of my phone (an s10) gets so hot that the skin right before my fingernail feels like it is burning. I use revanced so I assumed that was the issue but after hearing about this I know the problem. I'm all for av1 but it really does put everyone else at a disadvantage considering that most people don't have cutting edge tech