Format/Codec Wars - AV2 vs. VVC / H.266

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Talk about formats, codecs, and related standards here. Such as the recently re-announced AV2 video codec. Or you could sing the praises of Betamax or LaserDisc.

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1)
Versatile Video Coding (VVC) / H.266 / MPEG-I Part 3

VideoCardz: AV2 video codec delivers 30% lower bitrate than AV1, final spec due in late 2025

Andrey Norkin, who works at Netflix as research scientist and co-chairs at AOM, has confirmed that recent results show a 28.63% bitrate reduction compared to AV1 in PSRN-YUV (14:1:1) results and 32.59% in VMAF, the latter stands for Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion, which is a video quality metric developed by Netflix.

Spoiler: Presentation

More Alliance for Open Media presentations here: https://www.youtube.com/@allianceforopenmedia2446/videos

Keep in mind that it could take years after the final spec is released for AV2 to become relevant to anybody.

Claims about AV1 vs. VVC vary, but for example, this Intel Lunar Lake slide claims that VVC encoding is 10% more efficient than AV1. AV2 is probably better, or at worst, on par, with VVC.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

But will AV2 be able to topple MKV? I don't know and I doubt it.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

But will AV2 be able to topple MKV? I don't know and I doubt it.

MKV is a container format. You can put AV1 in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Operating_system_support

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

MKV is a container format. You can put AV1 in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Operating_system_support

Ah, I mistook it for AVI. Well, at least AV2 will be compatible with MKV down the line.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Ah, I mistook it for AVI. Well, at least AV2 will be compatible with MKV down the line.

The biggest feature of AV2 revealed: the name doesn't look like AVI.

 

[oldTireWater]

Digital storage will be the death of all human knowledge.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Digital storage will be the death of all human knowledge.

https://longnow.org/ideas/a-lunar-library/ (archive)

As Odysseus made its descent to the lunar surface, it carried with it an archive of human cultural knowledge – a Lunar Library, designed by the Arch Mission Foundation. Within that library is the data from The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project, our long-term archive of world languages. Now, as part of Odysseus’ moonfall, our work, and the linguistic heritage of all of humanity, will be preserved on the lunar surface.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

And yet niggers still won't stop using barely compressed h264 instead of even a reasonably efficient codec like HEVC, because in nigger logic bigger file = better quality.

 

[Slav Power]

And yet niggers still won't stop using barely compressed h264 instead of even a reasonably efficient codec like HEVC, because in nigger logic bigger file = better quality.

HEVC sucks monkey balls the moment you have to work on a file encoded in it. I'm yet to find one program that can clip my HEVC encoded movie torrents without shitting the bed and not forcing me to re-encode the whole fucking thing in x264 just to clip it.

x264 is the ol' reliable.

 

[ghastlyretard]

And yet niggers still won't stop using barely compressed h264 instead of even a reasonably efficient codec like HEVC, because in nigger logic bigger file = better quality.

I was grabbing something that was released yesterday and saw fucking XVID. Someone out there is encoding in fucking XVID to this day.

 

[⚞⛇⚟]

I have a question for audiophiles.
Does DSD sound better than PCM, and by how much? How much money would I need to spend in order to have speakers/headphones that allow me to hear the difference between PCM and DSD?

 

[lichen]

I have a question for audiophiles.
Does DSD sound better than PCM, and by how much? How much money would I need to spend in order to have speakers/headphones that allow me to hear the difference between PCM and DSD?

Not really an audiophile, but I do keep an eye on this kind of thing because I'd like to build a decent system one day. Mojo Audio is good on questions like this.

https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/dsd-vs-pcm-myth-vs-truth/

The truth is that in recent blind studies they've proved that high-resolution PCM and DSD are statistically indistinguishable from one another. Considering that nearly all DSD recordings were edited, mixed, and mastered in PCM, it is no wonder.

 

[snowdunes]

Digital storage will be the death of all human knowledge.

This. If we don't figure out a better and a more durable way to store information itself physically, this is just a waste of time. Who cares about containers when bitrot and durability fucking sucks. The most durable way to store information today is still books! As long it doesn't get wet or catch fire it will last +100 years. Can't say the same for disc, tapes or hard drives. One voltage spike, some magnetism or a little moist and you just lost some, if not everything.

 

[Preacher ✝]

And yet niggers still won't stop using barely compressed h264 instead of even a reasonably efficient codec like HEVC, because in nigger logic bigger file = better quality.

The majority of my collection is h264 because that's what's available. If we saw more widespread adoption of h265 I'd consider a sweeping update program, but that's a tall order for almost 20TB of data.

 

[419]

HEVC sucks monkey balls the moment you have to work on a file encoded in it. I'm yet to find one program that can clip my HEVC encoded movie torrents without shitting the bed and not forcing me to re-encode the whole fucking thing in x264 just to clip it.

x264 is the ol' reliable.

I'll sperg-rage for a moment here and say that I've gotten increasingly more fed up of the argument that "X format is shit because Y program doesn't work with it", because this is what almost every "format/codec war" that this thread is supposed to address is eventually going to boil down to anyway.

The niggers who bang this drum never stop to consider that this isn't a problem with the format itself as much as with the software vendor not bothering to provide support for it, when the specification and a reference implementation/library are already available. It's happened with WebP—and I'm sure it even happened with WebM for a while because of iToddlers—and it'll keep happening again with any successive video format the moment that a new one is released to supersede an older, less efficient one. Because in spite of those new formats, there is in fact nothing new under the sun and people will still complain about them even being made in the first place.

Nobody who uses a computer in this day and age ever complains about the existence of PNG because "we already have GIF, why do I need this new format that doesn't work on my Windows 95 PC". Nobody in their right mind is even going to complain about GIF being made and claim that we could have simply stuck with fucking RLE from the very beginning and never bothered to move on from it. Why do media file formats have to stagnate just because people decided to be iPad babies about it and throw a fit, because their other shit software doesn't support it NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW?

 

[Preacher ✝]

"X format is shit because Y program doesn't work with it"

Wait, what formats don't work in VLC?

 

[Slav Power]

I have a question for audiophiles.
Does DSD sound better than PCM, and by how much? How much money would I need to spend in order to have speakers/headphones that allow me to hear the difference between PCM and DSD?

Some mandatory viewing:

Basically, zero practical difference, CD Audio quality of the 80's was already pushing the limits of human hearing. Anything higher is there for editing and mixing so that you don't lose quality on downsampling, but for listening 44.1/48kHz PCM audio is perfectly fine. Most of the time what will actually fuck with the audio quality is dogshit mastering and the loudness war.

the software vendor not bothering to provide support for it

I never had any real issues handling WebP files, the only exception being animated ones, but I'm sure that I'll find something that'll handle those just fine. HEVC video on the other hand refuses to play nicely in anything. Even Premiere Pro leads to weird stuttery playback and encoding that doesn't happen when I play back the file in any other program. Maybe it's because the rips I download use variable framerate and seemingly nothing supports it properly, but then again, why is everything having a problem with it then?

 

["Controlled Demolition"]

This. If we don't figure out a better and a more durable way to store information itself physically, this is just a waste of time. Who cares about containers when bitrot and durability fucking sucks. The most durable way to store information today is still books! As long it doesn't get wet or catch fire it will last +100 years. Can't say the same for disc, tapes or hard drives. One voltage spike, some magnetism or a little moist and you just lost some, if not everything.

The second best thing is amplitude modulated magnetic tape. You hook magnetized head up to a signal amplifier and speaker and bob's your auntie, you've retrieved data without any needless processing. Magnetic tape storage has been, is, and will be the best long-term stable data storage format for a while, and not only because of the stability, but also because it's efficient for audio or simple data storage without any compression or formatting. Unlike discs, they also come in durable containers and even hard drives are getting there for long-term offline storage. Not writable discs though, and there's no guarantee you'll be able to find a computer that can access a current bleeding edge harddrive in 30 years. Not tapes, though. Nothing beats just a bunch of iron oxide smeared on plastic film.

 

[419]

I never had any real issues handling WebP files, the only exception being animated ones, but I'm sure that I'll find something that'll handle those just fine. HEVC video on the other hand refuses to play nicely in anything. Even Premiere Pro leads to weird stuttery playback and encoding that doesn't happen when I play back the file in any other program. Maybe it's because the rips I download use variable framerate and seemingly nothing supports it properly, but then again, why is everything having a problem with it then?

Adobe is one of the last vendors I'd trust to support any new format reliably from the get-go in any case, but beyond that I wish I could say much.

The only wild guess I could throw out is that variable framerate wouldn't be that easily supported in the same way as hardware variable refresh rate would have spotty support, but I'm likely chatting shit even with that statement. I really wouldn't know there.

 

[A Cardboard Box]

physically

Like titanium tablets stored in pressurized containers filled with noble gasses like what Scientology does?

I have a question for audiophiles.

Excellent. I am here to help.

Does DSD sound better than PCM, and by how much? How much money would I need to spend in order to have speakers/headphones that allow me to hear the difference between PCM and DSD?

There's been a number of blind studies to determine this specifically, and the answer is absolutely not. Modern DSD and high-res PCM are beyond the capacity for human hearing to distinguish. Studies have found that virtually all of the perceived inferiority of PCM has nothing to do with PCM itself and everything to do with poor mastering, low bit depth, or bad DACs. Do not fall for the DSD meme.