Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “AV1 Streaming is Here: Get Ready”.
Things I do understand why this is exciting. Obs, just added av1 support for YouTube live streams. This is super cool. It’S happening. You want to talk us through this one yeah, so OBS, Studio’s 29.1 update supports streaming to YouTube using the av1 encoder streaming with av-1 results.
In boosted image, quality and bit rate that can be reduced by up to uh and bitrate that can be reduced by up to 40 without sacrificing image quality yeah. So you can kind of pick one yeah! You can keep your bit rate the same and have better image quality or you can lower your bit rate, which could save you on bandwidth costs or data. Well, those are the same thing. Um could also make it easier for your viewers to watch it original quality.
I guess I’m trying to think that’s, that’s more reverting to the previous one, where you’re you’re gaining more quality right bandwidth. I think the main way this is going to be used, which is a massive win, is to achieve the same amount, but with way less bandwidth. Yeah and that’s that, okay, the cynic in me will go wow good, a win for Amazon, I’m sure glad that they can save money on all these twitch streams, but this is actually a W for everybody. Yeah unnecessary internet bits, unnecessary traffic is harmful for absolutely. Everyone involved it clogs up the pipes or tubes. Excuse me, sorry, it’s just a series. No, but it as much as that. You do in your tubes is a stupid analogy and the internet is not a series of tubes. It’S actually not entirely wrong either. The more data that you have unnecessarily taking up your switching capacity, the less data you can deliver more quickly for everything else yeah. This is a win all around. This is good and it’s gon na cost.
You maybe a little bit in terms of encoding and decoding power consumption. That’S, I think, maybe the the the worst possible outcome of this, but as av1 Hardware, encode and decode becomes far more prevalent over I’d, say probably the next two years or so especially good implementations. It’S gon na be like kind of on any new product within about the next 24 months. I would guess this is gon na be freaking awesome.
I mean we’ve tested it fairly extensively, especially when Intel released their arc graphics cards and we found out hey they’re. The first ones to deliver a next gen uh GPU with av1 encoding. How does this work Dave? You want encoding felt next, gen, no real other part of the card necessarily did but the av-1 coating a hundred percent did a hundred percent.
They totally delivered there. Another sign in favor of av1 approaching Mass adoption is that match Rocks video whose graphics cards are widely used for workstations video walls and digital signage has released a new series of luma graphis cards powered by Intel’s Alchemist. We were just talking about this architecture, which includes Intel’s excellent av1.
Transcoding ability makes sense. Twitch does not currently support av1 um, but I I bet on it coming they’ve I mean I guess they had that source code leak a while back. I I I I I we could. We could probably check and see if they’re, if everyone was not very flavor of the month, if we were unethical folks who would download the twitch source code leak, which I am not saying we are, we could look at it and we could see if maybe they Had some early work on av1 or something like that that they were that they were looking into but yeah you wan na you wan na kick that business. They were definitely working on it at the time I mean if, if not twitch, then certainly Amazon there’s no way that folks, like the the team, that’s working on Prime Prime video or Netflix um or YouTube, there’s no way that they haven’t been working on av1 because For years, they’ve been working away at this standard uh working on what the hardware, encode and decode implementations will look like, bringing it to maturity. Uh. This whole process takes like just with how big the industry is and how slow moving it is. Now it can take 10 years, I mean how long have we been trying to move on from h.264? His hevc was one attempt, but the licensing fees – and I know, there’s been – there’s been other attempts as well. A huge part of the problem has ended up being licensing multiple times, whereas av1 is a game changer, because my understanding is, it costs nothing to implement.
It still doesn’t have the same licensing set up as h.264. I don’t know all the intricate details of the differences between them, but I know it’s not like identical hold on there might be a fee. Let me just have a look here: royalty free standards are not free of cost, and this is blah blah blah.
Okay. So what I do know is that it’s much more appealing and therefore is seeing much broader adoption than hevc. I know when I was when I was hanging out down at Nasa, which is one of the coolest things to say ever.
I was talking to one of their tech people about video compression and coding transferring data all the different complications. They have around that going around the dark side of the moon going to Mars the data complications of those different situations, and I asked what about av1 yeah. They currently use h.264 and they would love to use av1 but they’re concerned about licensing issues.
Oh interesting, even even at that level concerned about licensing issues ah kind of sucks. It would help them a lot because the amount of stuff that they have to send back and forth and the fixed pipe that they have is is a very difficult equation for them. Um. So av1 apparently has royalty free licensing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no cost um, so yeah we’ll have to we’ll have to get you guys.
An update on that, because I’m actually kind of interested I squid hominid over on float plane chat, is saying. It’Ll be a game changer for twitch once they add av1, because right now, you’re hard capped at six megabit per second and you aren’t guaranteed transcoding, so unless you’re a prominent streamer um. Basically, the platform has kind of self-selected itself to be limited to you know two and a half to three megabytes per megabit per second streams unless you’re a big deal on the platform already which hurts discoverability of small creators, because why are you going to tune in And watch someone playing this game unless they have an absolutely electric personality. Why are you going to tune in and watch someone play this game at low craptastic quality when you can tune into one of the big streamers and it can look freaking awesome and probably sound better too, I mean the kinds of compromises you have to make to Do to stream at two and a half three megabit per second they’re, pretty pretty yucky av1 will be able to do 1080p at that and still look pretty decent.
I’M excited this is freaking awesome, yeah, so when’s float playing gon na support. It we’ll support it. Eventually, it’s not in the cards right now. We we have some pretty Monster, uh bandwidth, caps on our live stream, and last time I checked um so yeah I don’t know we’re not working on it.
[ Laughter, ], all right. We will work on it eventually, uh. We are not working on it right now. We got all the stuff to do. .