The new AV1 video codec is performing better than expected, according to Facebook engineers, who put AV1 through a benchmark test trying to mimic Facebook's real-world environment as accurately as possible.
AV1, the new video compression technology (codec), launched on March 28th and is a creation of the Alliance For Open Media, an organization made up of numerous technology companies.
The development of the AV1 codec (AOMedia Video 1) began in 2015, when Google, Cisco and Mozilla – Xiph.org combined three codecs – VPX, Thor and Daala – into a new project aimed at creating a royalty-free codec that would be available to anyone. The project was completed two weeks ago, when AOM announced the public availability of the AV1 codec, a video compression technology that it claims is able to reduce video file size by 30% compared to existing technologies, based on some independent tests carried out.
Facebook engineers decided to do their own tests and as they report “Our tests show that AV1 exceeds the target of 30% better compression than VP9 and more specifically achieves a 50.3% increase compared to X.264 main profile, 46.2% compared to X.264 high profile and 34% compared to VP9. The comparisons were conducted mainly with Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) video files, because these are currently the most popular video formats on Facebook. However, because AV1’s performance increases as the video resolution increases, we conclude that there will likely be an even greater difference in UHD / 4K and 8K. The only drawback was the compression time, which was longer compared to the other codecs, but this was expected.
