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YouTube moves to AV1 by default to the dismay of some Android users (www.androidpolice.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Arif Dikici, who is a part of the Android Video and Image Codecs team at Google, recently announced on LinkedIn that Android will now use an AV1 decoder known as “libdav1d,” which was created by the team behind VLC.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hardware decoding is the whole point. Hardware support is notorious for lagging greatly behind software. Desktop support is not great either right now. It makes you wonder what Google's reason is, they have to be aware that must people won't be able to use it properly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I know hardware decoding is the point. But you can't just wait until every phone on the planet supports it.

Their reason is that it's a massively better format.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

But you can't just wait until every phone on the planet supports it.

The proper approach is simply to have the app check the hardware decode capabilities of the device and use the best option. Pretty sure that's what YT has always done for codec transitions in the past.

Forcing AV1 on devices without hardware decode will end up making users think their battery is starting to wear out, even with the better software decoder'

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

...massively better for whom? I mean I understand if they start using it and offering it to devices that support it. But if they push something that needs software decoding when there are other formats that have hardware support it's going to be a shit fest.

Right now AVC (H264) has hardware 4k support and HEVC (H265) has hardware 2k, while AV1 only has 1080p software. What's the point of offering AV1 4k?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Massively better quality per byte.

You know, the sole purpose of a lossy video codec?

But the licensing is also far better for end consumers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

None of that is going to benefit you if your phone barfs its guts trying to decode it. Until you get a phone with hardware support it's going to be purely theoretical. And if Google forces you to decode 720p AV1 in software when you have a perfectly good AVC and HEVC hardware decoder just sitting there is going to be downright stupid.