SVT-AV1 VS enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-decoding

The docs mention that the unit for this option is in "frames" (not "seconds").

From the pull request:

In these tests SVT-AV1 beats x265 on quality:

- FullHD: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/2022/main_repor...

- FullHD 10-bit: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/2022/10_bit_rep...

- 4K: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/2022/4k_report....

SVT-AV1 has seen a number of speed ups in recent releases:

https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/releases

I don't see this options under the "Advanced features" like for H.265/HEVC (for example). Also, adding "-input-depth 10" manually to the command line doesn't work (it doesn't recognize the parameter, despite it clearly being written here as one of them).

Docs for SVT-AV1 at https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Docs

I find it interesting that you know the project well enough to get to the pre-compiled binaries page, yet somehow missed that the merge request explictly calls out a VMAF LOSS for the SSIM tune by several percentage points.

SVT-AV1 has no NEON.

I used the precompiled FFmpeg from SVT-AV1's git: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/jobs/4540276837

Most devices can indeed most likely handle software decode of more common resolutions, codecs and bitrates. But I'd really hope they'd pick the one that won't suck up all the battery, so H264. This line of thought is supported by the fact that YouTube still provides an H264 option with most if not all videos.

With higher bitrate things, HEVC seems to grow in popularity but even software decode support is not everywhere. Netflix for example requires the installation of HEVC support on Windows to play 4K content.

Actually hardware-accelerated video decode is even spottier and more unreliable across most platforms. The JS API for codec support (canPlayType) literally returns "maybe" and "probably". It's quite bad.

So far the best compatibility I've seen has been Edge with flags on Windows (MPEG-2, H264, HEVC, AV1, VP8, VP9 with most also supporting accelerated encode). It still fails with some content (Dolby Vision P5 colors are incorrect, HEVC Rext doesn't play - more info about HEVC is available here https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...). Chrome on macOS is a close second in terms of codec support.

The worst in terms of HW acceleration being all the browsers on desktop Linux-s, few and fragile combinations that offer limited and janky support. But it's slowly improving. This combined with the not-the-latest hardware many use, means things like VP9 or AV1 tend to stutter.

I'd love to see some more generic stats, but considering the APIs aren't sufficient to determine actual support, these might be difficult to gather.

> The 'right' solution would be to just use system codecs for everything. Many apps need good implementations of image codecs. They just need to be implemented once by the OS vendor (or the toolkit on Linux).

Windows has done this and is still doing this, but the decade-long track history so far is that this does not work well. It can work, in a very limited scope and if you have a lot of influence.

Sure, it's really nice if an 8K@60Hz HDR HEVC video plays perfectly straight in your browser or desktop app, but more often than not, it just won't. You don't have the right browser, the extension installed (due to license agreements), good enough graphics drivers or someone has forgotten a flag yet again.

And we haven't even gotten to the immense amount of variation each codec introduces or the potential attack surface.

How shit the situation is with just HEVC (and thus also basically HEIC): https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...

> Just file a bug against your OS.

In the end that "just" carries a lot of burden, it can't be the users reporting these issues.

It's just way easier to leech off of ffmpeg and similar, and let it deal with all the formats. Instead of hoping that maybe you can leverage what the OS gives you, that it works and works correctly in all your edge-cases.

Though not everything is that gloomy, there are Vulkan extensions that might (in the future) simplify cross-platform image and video decoding (and HW acceleration).

I think there are a few patches that can enable HEVC hardware decoding with chromium. Though I am a firefox user so I didn't test whether these patches works or not. https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...