On September 1, 2015, a new organization with a clear goal was created: to work together to avoid multiple ownership and licensing battles, which at the same time was ranked second, which was none other than implementing the best video data compression methods in the industry.
The organization was called Alliance for Open Media, which was well known for AOMedia and where its founders were; Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix and Mozilla, then followed AMD, ARM and NVIDIA.
From that union a codec was created AV1, the next step for streaming video data.
AV1 codec: designed for real-time software and applications
Video and audio codecs have always been controversial, because previously they were earning an economic advantage while using them when the right software or hardware had to pay subscriptions to support them. In short, it was a business that made sense given the speed of finding homes and smartphones on the Internet.
The global trend began to evolve at high speeds of 3G and 4G, as well as fiber optical and transmission, where we will now face higher speeds thanks to new nodes and 5G, thus, the need to compress data and pay for use or support codec to a better life at some point and with the introduction of AOMedia, he ended up dying.
Now something different is needed, because higher speed has begun to allow greater quality in streaming in real time, to maximize the data consumed and also to increase the original problem, only without central control. Therefore, codecs such as VP9 are introduced, resulting in up to 40% improvement compared to veteran H.264 and a smaller rate compared to HEVC.
Although the market continues to handle H.264 at high volume, the new codec saw the light that it had redone everyone else: AV1.
Features and resources
AV1 is officially launched in 2018 and is slowly gaining ground in the fight against HEVC and VP9. Its strategy is simple: get a figure to use a thank you amount of support for all kinds of devices, companies and technologies.
Chrome and Firefox They have been collecting sponsorships for months now and are getting a much bigger share of traffic than previous codecs, YouTube has been spending some time with the same results again now Netflix It kicks off its launch.
In addition, Intel and Netflix have developed exclusively for a specific codec type called SVT-AV1, which promises to install 4K at 60 Hz in real time and 10 bits, but on other Intel CPUs and GPUs (Gen 11 soon, Gen 9 Not yet known Gen 12 by 2021 is guaranteed).
Obviously, AV1 was created according to Google VP9 specifications, but the help and tools of all affiliates have increased their performance to levels not seen so far, where it is estimated to be 34% more efficient at data compression than VP9 and 46% than the X264.
AV1 has the meaning of Open Standard ITU-T as a free software under the terms of the FreeBSD license, so it can be used without any problem, provided that it does not claim patents from any of the companies involved.
To support HDR and better color, the metadata can be integrated into a small video stream instead of being signed to a container, which later resulted in three different profiles to separate the quality and performance of the codec: Primary, High and High.
Main Profile allows 8 or 10 bit color depth per sample, with chroma sampling of 4: 0: 0 (grayscale) and 4: 2: 0. High profile adds chroma support 4: 4 : 4 sampling. The professional profile extends the capabilities to be fully compatible with chroma 4: 0: 0, 4: 2: 0, 4: 2: 2 and 4: 4: 4 in color depths of 8, 10 and 12 colors.
As for its standards, AOMedia puts it down from 2.0 to 6.3, where 6.2 is highest for a solution of 7680 × 4320 at 120 FPS, so it predates its competitors in this category.
The future of this podec is brightly colored, slowly spreading and improving, which is currently the best performing quality per code generated by KB, so it's not surprising that a giant like Netflix or YouTube is currently using it.
