The Alliance for Open Media Kickstarts Video Innovation Era with “AV1” Release
Today, the Alliance is proud to announce the public release of the AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification, which delivers cross-platform, 4K UHD or higher online video, royalty-free – all while lowering data usage.
Blog post by Yu Liu, Facebook: AV1 beats x264 and libvpx-vp9 in practical use case
Blog post by Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, Xiph: next generation video: Introducing AV1
The specification is still a draft: AV1 Bitstream & Decoding Process Specification
AOMedia Codec Workgroup Approved version 1.0
AV1 Bitstream and Decoding Process Specification
It is now a little more done than it was in March. 
AV1 decode is enabled by default in Chrome 69: Chrome Platform Status
Here is an AV1-encoded video: https://video.1ko.ch/codec-comparison/videos/av1-2018-06_550.webm
Format : WebM
Format version : Version 4 / Version 2
File size : 1.09 MiB
Duration : 16 s 625 ms
Overall bit rate : 551 kb/s
Writing application : aomenc 1.0.0-6-gce8f4811b
Writing library : libwebm-0.2.1.0
Video
ID : 1
Format : V_AV1
Codec ID : V_AV1
Duration : 16 s 608 ms
Bit rate : 523 kb/s
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 800 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.40:1
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 24.025 FPS
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.014
Stream size : 1.03 MiB (95%)
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No
I played it with Chrome 69 Dev. Not so great performance, but I expect that to improve soon. Make sure chrome://flags/#enable-av1-decoder is enabled.
Firefox Nightly should also be able to play it…
That setting is not in Chrome 68 stable
No, Chrome 69 (Opera 56) will be the first stable and beta to have it. It debuted in Chrome 65 Dev, but was “not ready for the beta channel”. (The specification was frozen 25 June.)
AV1 in Chromium is postponed to M70.
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5729898442260480
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/3416497c874e5f121ade527e6796192818654436
“AV1 is not ready. Disable it on the M69 branch.”
AV1 on YouTube. Enable at https://www.youtube.com/testtube
The first videos to receive YouTube's AV1 transcodes.Support for AV1 in MP4 within Media Source is available in Chrome 70, and Firefox 63 builds newer than September 13 with the media.av1.enabled pref set.
Using a supported browser and choosing the ‘Prefer AV1 for SD’ setting on youtube.com/testtube, you should see AV1 used for these videos when playing less than 480p, switching to VP9 for higher resolutions.
At time of writing, these transcodes are encoded at a very high bitrate for decoder performance testing.
The videos selected here represent a large slice of content that YouTube users enjoy, from talking-head programs to popular music videos. We’ve chosen action videos featuring snow and water spray, as these tend to stress encoders and decoders alike. Animated footage and game captures (coming soon) provide a wider range of content, and we round out the set with some beautiful stuff straight from the makers of cinema cameras.
Just a few videos today, but our commitment to AV1 is strong, and we have ambitious goals for rolling out the new format. Look for AV1 transcodes on the videos from your favorite creators soon.
At FHD, it is sometimes a little heavy on the CPU, due to high bitrate and slow decoder.
Play AV1 videos on your Windows 10 device. This extension is an early beta version of the AV1 software decoder that lets you play videos that have been encoded using the AV1 video coding standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media. Since this is an early release, you might see some performance issues when playing AV1 videos. We’re continuing to improve this extension. If you allow apps to be updated automatically, you should get the latest updates and improvements when we release them.
Tears of Steel in AV1: https://bitmovin.com/demos/av1
Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VideoLAN) has written about Dav1d, an alternative AV1-decoder, which is already much faster than the reference implementation libaom. Dav1d might be used in Firefox 65.
dav1d: performance and completion of the first release
dav1d is very fast, dav1d is almost complete, dav1d is cool.
Minor update of libaom: v1.0.0-errata1 - aom - Git at Google
And Dav1d gets more SSSE3: SSSE3 SIMD (#216) · Issues · VideoLAN / dav1d · GitLab
Initially, developers prioritised AVX2, and more is coming there too: AVX2 SIMD (#78) · Issues · VideoLAN / dav1d · GitLab
VideoLAN’s AV1 decoder is getting faster.
Ewout ter Hoeven: dav1d 0.3.0 Sailfish: ARMed to the teeth
A month ago, Chromium (M75) switched to using Dav1d: ede4345734371ac35b4e50cea7ef3332dabd54d5 - chromium/src - Git at Google
SVT-AV1 0.5.0 was released yesterday, on WebM’s ninth anniversary.
https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1
An older blog post about the AV1-encoder Scalable Video Technology for AV1: Intel, Netflix to Deliver AV1 Scalable Codec to Power Next-Gen Compression Tech for Visual Workloads
Today Firefox 67 was released, with the AV1-decoder Dav1d.
[b][i]Smoother video playback with today’s AV1 Update[/i][/b] – AV1 is the new royalty-free video format jointly developed by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others as part of the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). We first provided AV1 support by shipping the reference decoder in January’s Firefox release. Today’s Firefox release is updated to use the newer, higher-performance AV1 decoder known as dav1d. We have seen great growth in the use of AV1 even in just a few months, with our latest figures showing that 11.8% of video playback in Firefox Beta used AV1, up from 0.85% in February and 3% in March.https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/21/latest-firefox-release-is-faster-than-ever/
VideoLAN’s AV1 decoder Dav1d is getting faster again.
Changes for 0.4.0 ‘Cheetah’:
Ewout ter Hoeven:
AV1 is ready for prime time: SVT-AV1 beats x265 and libvpx in quality, bitrate and speed
Dav1d 0.5.0 ‘Asiatic Cheetah’:
0.5.0 is a medium release fixing regressions and minor issues, and improving speed significantly:
[]Export ITU T.35 metadata
[]Speed improvements on blend_ on ARM
[]Speed improvements on decode_coef and MSAC
[]NEON optimizations for blend*, w_mask_, ipred functions for ARM64
[]NEON optimizations for CDEF and warp on ARM32
[]SSE2 optimizations for MSAC hi_tok decoding
[]SSSE3 optimizations for deblocking loopfilters and warp_affine
[]AVX-2 optimizations for film grain and ipred_z2
[]SSE4 optimizations for warp_affine
[]VSX optimizations for wiener
[]Fix inverse transform overflows in x86 and NEON asm
[]Fix integer overflows with large frames
[]Improve film grain generation to match reference code
[]Improve compatibility with older binutils for ARM
[*]More advanced Player example in tools
Phoronix has benchmarked 0.5.0 and 0.4.0:
Dav1d 0.5 Released With AVX2, SSSE3 & ARM64 Performance Improvements - Benchmarks
Rav1e 0.1.0 has been released.
Rav1e is an AV1-encoder written in Rust.
First official release, published during the Video Dev Days 2019 in Tokyo.
Features
[]Intra and inter frames
[]64×64 superblocks
[]4×4 to 64×64 RDO-selected square and 2:1/1:2 rectangular blocks
[]DC, H, V, Paeth, smooth, and a subset of directional prediction modes
[]DCT, (FLIP-)ADST and identity transforms (up to 64×64, 16×16 and 32×32 respectively)
[]8-, 10- and 12-bit depth color
[]4:2:0 (full support), 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 (limited) chroma sampling
[]11 speed settings (0–10)
[]Near real-time encoding at high speed levels
[]Rate control (single-pass and two-pass)
[]Temporal RDO
[]Scene cut detection
[*]CLI tool and C API
Dav1d 0.5.1 ‘Asiatic Cheetah’:
0.5.1 is a small release improving speeds and fixing minor issues compared to 0.5.0:
[]SSE2 optimizations for CDEF, wiener and warp_affine
[]NEON optimizations for SGR on ARM32
[]Fix mismatch issue in x86 asm in inverse identity transforms
[]Fix build issue in ARM64 assembly if debug info was enabled
[*]Add a workaround for Xcode 11 -fstack-check bug
SVT-AV1: open-source AV1 encoder and decoder (Netflix Technology Blog)
All releases of SVT-AV1 (encoder, decoder): https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/releases
All releases of Rav1e (encoder): Releases · xiph/rav1e · GitHub
Changelog for Dav1d (decoder): NEWS · master · VideoLAN / dav1d · GitLab