What I Learned About Deploying Av1 From Two Deployers
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The debate around deploying AV1 encoding for media collections is heating up, with users weighing the benefits of reduced file sizes against potential quality losses. Some, like cmbernard333, are converting their H265 collections to AV1, while others, like blueside, have hit snags with device compatibility - although author breve suggests using VLC as a workaround. The discussion highlights the complexities of optimizing AV1 output for specific devices and the trade-offs between file size and video quality, with some, like dragontamer, cautioning that repeated lossy compression can degrade quality, while others, like LeFantome, argue that AV1's artifacts can sometimes be subjectively preferable to those of H.265. As users navigate these trade-offs, the conversation is revealing the nuances of AV1 adoption in real-world applications.
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I started looking into converting stuff to AV1 but only confirmed that my gpu doesn't support AV1 but does support hevc so I stopped there...
Put VLC on them. See if it works for your AV1 videos.
AppleTV with Infuse can direct stream and software decode AV1 at 4K 24fps. Not sure about AV1 HDR though.
Every form of lossy compression deleted data. Yes AV1 is more efficient but only when working off of high quality originals.
H265 already deleted a ton of data. It can never recover the quality loss. Compressing even further can only worsen the image.
If you must delete, delete starting from the 50GB+ original BluRays if at all possible, or some other very high quality source. That way the compression algorithm has the best chance of saving the important scene data.
With that reasoning, lossless compression of .wav to .flac destroys >50% of data.
In actuality, you can reconstruct much of the source even with lossy compression. Hell, 320kbps mp3 (and equivalent aac, opus, etc) is indistinguishable from lossless and thus aurally transparant to humans, meaning as far as concerns us, there is no data loss.
If said noise still exists after H265.
And there's no guarantee that these noise detection algorithms are compatible with H264, H265, AV1, or future codecs H266 or AV2.
1. the prediction tools of AV1 are better than those of h265.
2. If the prediction is better, the residuals will be smaller.
3. Those residuals are converted to frequency domain in a smarter way for AV1, so that you have a better grouping of coefficients close to the DC component. (Less zeros interleaving non-zero values.)
4. Those coefficients compress better, with a better entropy coding algorithm too.
You can have exactly the same video quality for h265 and AV1 yet still have a lower bitrate for the latter and with no additional decision made to “find out what humans can’t see.”
The most common “artifact” of AV1 is to make things slightly more blurry for example. A common H.265 artifact is “blockiness”. I have re-encoded H.265 to AV1 and not only gotten smaller files that playback better on low-end hardware but also display less blockiness while still looking high-resolution and great colour overall.
I always encode 10 bit colour and fast-decode for re-encoding to AV1, even if coming from an 8 bit original.
A lot of movies have purposeful noise, blurriness, snow, and fake artifacts to represent flashback scenes.
https://github.com/rust-av/Av1an
Maybe if you're going to a lower resolution it would be fine (ie: going from 4k 265 to 720p AV1).
For what it's worth, AB-AV1 [1] is a pretty awesome tool written in rust which compares random samples from a file at different parameters based on their VMAF score [2] (algorithm from Netflix for human-perceived visual likeness), choosing optimal parameters to save as much space as possible with the loss you're willing to stomach, on a file-by-file basis.
Small plug: I made a nice little python GUI wrapper for ab-av1 [3].
[1] - https://github.com/alexheretic/ab-av1 [2] - https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf [3] - https://github.com/Loufe/AB-AV1-GUI
It would be cool if one day (if not already today?) you could use AV1 as a drop-in replacement for h264 for recording, smoothly editing without proxy clips and rendering.
DaVinci Resolve's free version on Linux does not support h264 but apparently does support AV1. Kdenlive supports both.