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.
This is not a very helpful article summary.
One of the key benefits of the codec is that it helps maintain video quality during compression and decoding, so many users are excited about the potential for higher quality AV1 video. However, not everyone is happy with the change — particularly those with older devices and midrange phones. It’s mostly newer higher-end phones that have hardware decoding support for AV1, so those with midrange devices and older flagships may have to rely on software decoding now that YouTube has opted in to the libdav1d decoder. Many of these Android users have expressed concern over how the change will impact their battery life if it means a move away from hardware-accelerated decoding.
This is not a very helpful article summary.
Sorry it wasn’t meant to be. I just thought it was funny that they’re taking advantage of VideoLAN’s library (which is presumably open source) rather than their own.
I would guess some Google devs have contributed to it.
Youtube has multiple format streams (vp9, avc (mp4), av1) by default. So frontends choose the one supported and good.
Reminder that all libaom versions are named after My Little Pony characters. Anytime you watch a video encoded in AV1 you are consuming My Little Pony content
I don’t know if this is meant as a warning, or a “ha, fuck you!”, or an attempt to spark outrage, or to make us all cozy inside.
I’ve never watched the shit so it’s hard for me to tell.
One one hand av1 has some great advantages and this will force some lagging OEMs to add hardware support
On the other hand snake ass google already split encoding into premium qualities, so they’re just gonna set the “free” bitrate so low it may as well be H264.
How can I test if my phone uses hardware decoding for AV1?
Pixel 6 & newer, newer MediaTek devices, anything with the Snapdragon 8 gen 2 or newer. It took Qualcomm a while because many companies (including Apple) were holding out for VVC, which to this day isn’t in a great state. iPhone 15 Pro & newer support AV1 hwdec
Are they still using Mp3 for audio or have they switched to something more modern for that too?
Pretty sure they use opus
They’ve been using opus for probably around a decade at this point, and in fact YouTube was a pretty early adopter of it and had a large role in popularizing it
Opus and AAC
Firefox for android supports extensions so could probably use youtube mp4 there. Not sure what other youtube frontends (if functional still since the crackdown) support changing the codec
AV1 has been quite disappointing compared to HEVC. Encoding and decoding is super heavy and hardware acceleration is very lacking.
