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Video: Will AV1 Eclipse HEVC?

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Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Timothy Terriberry: One of the things that I think is really interesting about AV1 as compared to the prior generationsis you get 37% better performance. If you look at where you get those gains, HEVC got most of its gains at high resolutions. Right? Add larger block sizes and larger transforms and all that. This time around, that's not what we're seeing.

So, what we're actually seeing is that those 30% gains are relatively uniform across all bid rates and across all resolutions. And what that means is that you are actually going to be able to start targeting a lot more of the world with these kinds of improvements. So, you start looking at places like Africa that don't have the greatest infrastructure where you can save 30% right there, that starts to make a really big difference.

So, I think AV1 is actually going to be able to target a much broader set of use cases than HEVC was enabling.

David Sayed: Do you think the HEVC is going to stand still? In other words, are there more optimizations that are available in the HEVC world?

Timothy Terriberry: This is generally true with any codec: the performance you get out of it when the standard is frozen is not going to be the performance you get out of it five years later.

David Sayed: We saw that with H264.

Timothy Terriberry: Right. And we're going to see that again with AV1. So, I don't think any of these codecs are going to stand still. We continually get smarter about how we make encoder decisions, and I think there are probably plenty of people in this room who are working on those exact problems.

Tarek Amara: The reason I also believe AV1 will be probably more successful is because this time, there are a lot more companies around it. Chip manufacturers are really supporting it. They were very present during the spec design. Lots of commonalities with VP9, which makes time to market a lot faster. And it's royalty-free. So, why would someone not go for something free and better? Even by 5%? Even if it is equal to HEVC? And I think that we will see AV1 deployed a lot faster than lots of people believe.

That doesn't mean HEVC is going to die. It looks like the broadcast market is more of an MPEG-related standard industry, where you see all the TVs support HEVC, and lots of sets of boxes with HEVC. So, all the devices that are for traditional TV broadcast are HEVC-capable today. So, probably that's the market that will be covered with HEVC, but as soon as AV1 becomes mature, we'll have browser support, even Twitch is part of the development, and we added a feature, actually, to even improve our latency compared to HEVC and VP9. Probably within the year, we'll start seeing streams being generated.

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