By Pradeep Ramachandran
After what seems to have been a long delay, AV1 finally froze its bitstream last week! Like many folks in the industry, we have been waiting for this moment for a long time to see what a truly ‘royalty-free’ codec can can bring in terms of tools to the encoding space.
A few months ago, we stopped looking further into how AV1’s tools compare to that of HEVC due to this peer-review paper published in a leading journal from leading researchers in the field of video coding. That paper reported that the HM encoder provide average bitrate savings of 30% relative to AV1 with an encoding speed that was 25X that of the AV1 encoder; the informed would know that x265’s veryslow is very comparable in encoder efficiency to the HM encoder. While optimizations could bridge the gap in speed, bridging the gap in encoder efficiency would be hard unless some fundamental improvements (that are not covered by the HEVC-patents, mind you) are made. Now that the bitstream is frozen, we will be digging to see what new tools have been brought to the table that were not included in this comparison in the hope to answer the question “Is AV1 fundamentally better than HEVC as a standard?”. Stay tuned here to hear more, or share your thoughts on doom9/x265-devel mailing list.
And of course, there is the issue of patent royalties and licensing, but we will leave that up to the lawyers to deliberate and decide; lets talk more tech here!