Dav2d

(code.videolan.org)

163 points | by dabinat 2 hours ago

8 comments

  • jzebedee 2 hours ago
    Project description:

      dav2d is the fastest AV2 decoder on all platforms :)
      Targeted to be small, portable and very fast.
    
    If you're out of the loop like me:

      AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates. It is optimized for the evolving demands of streaming, broadcasting, and real-time video conferencing. 
    
    - from https://av2.aomedia.org/
    • delfinom 1 hour ago
      • ronsor 21 minutes ago
        This is a thinly veiled extortion racket and any competent system would fine them into bankruptcy.
      • Telaneo 1 hour ago
        They've done the same thing with AV1, and I can't see that having prevented adoption, nor can I imagine Sisvel wanting to poke the bear that is AOMedia unless they're certain their case is absolutely watertight.
        • walrus01 1 hour ago
          I see zero public evidence that they've filed any lawsuits against the members of AOM in any jurisdiction. I'm sure there's been a lot of threatening letters sent...
          • Telaneo 58 minutes ago
            Same, which is what makes it seem to me that that case is absolutely not watertight. Those patents are probably all about esoteric minutiae (to be fair, that's because that's what it takes to make a better video codec these days) and everything and anything that can seemingly be connected to AV2 (or AV1 for that matter), many of which have only gotten a patent because the person approving it only barely understands what it's saying.
      • walrus01 1 hour ago
        Sisvel is a patent troll. Take a look at the combined list of all companies that are the AOM and tell me with a straight face that all of their corporate in house counsel specializing in intellectual property law are wrong.
        • asveikau 26 minutes ago
          I don't know this stuff super well but I imagine it's not necessarily about the lawyers being right or wrong so much as what they can convince people of. The ideal scenario for the patent troll is they can intimidate you into licensing with them. Another good outcome for them (though more costly) is they can convince some non-expert in court. In either case the big players behind the codec can defend themselves but a small one just picking it up downstream as OSS can't.
          • walrus01 19 minutes ago
            I don't doubt for a minute that they are going to attempt to intimidate companies using av1 which are much smaller than the AOM founders.
  • tensor 1 hour ago
    Not on topic, but wow the internet has very quickly devolved into: click -> "making sure you're not a bot", click -> "making sure you're a human", click -> "COOKIES COOKIES COOKIES", click -> "cloudflare something something"
    • thresh 1 hour ago
      We had to set it up on the parts of VideoLAN infra so the service would remain usable.

      Otherwise it was under a constant DDoS by the AI bots.

      • nerdralph 15 minutes ago
        I highly doubt there is no other technically feasible option to block the AI bots. You end up blocking not just bots, but many humans too. When I clicked on the link and the bot block came up, I just clicked back. I think HN posts should have warnings when the site blocks you from seeing it until you somehow, maybe, prove you are human.
        • goobatrooba 2 minutes ago
          I'm sure there are many solutions for many problems, but expecting a small Foss development team to know or implement them all is rather unreasonable.

          I think the world gains more if the VLAN team focuses on their amazing, free contribution to the world, than if they spend the same time trying to figure out how to save you two clicks.

          We all hate that this is happening, but you don't need to attack everyone that is unfortunately caught up in it.

        • overfeed 0 minutes ago
          > I highly doubt there is no other technically feasible option to block the AI bots.

          If you have discovered such anoption, you could get very wealthy: minimizing friction for humans in e-commerce is valuable.

        • thresh 2 minutes ago
          I'm all ears on how we can fix it otherwise.

          Keep in mind that those kinds of services: - should not be MITMed by CDNs - are generally ran by volunteers with zero budget, money and time-wise

    • port11 1 hour ago
      The internet is such a Tragedy of the Commons… its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable.
      • codedokode 57 minutes ago
        No, it is because citizen allow treating them like this.
      • honktime 1 hour ago
        Its pretty explicitly not a tragedy of the commons. Its a tragedy of the ruling class abusing the resources of the 'commons' to extract value. There is nothing 'commons' about trillion dollar companies extracting all available value from the labor of the working class. That's just the tragedy that'll bring around the death of society, the same tragedy that brings all other tragedys
        • throw-the-towel 1 hour ago
          The commons in question is the internet itself.
        • amusingimpala75 1 hour ago
          Thank you for describing the tragedy of the commons
        • dyauspitr 1 hour ago
          There’s definitely lots of problems with the ruling class and wealth disparity. Perhaps the defining problems of our current age.

          That being said, so many of the plebs suck. Like 2% will ruin everything for everyone.

          • throw-the-towel 1 hour ago
            While a lot of the plebs do suck, a pleb who sucks causes way less problems than a big corp that sucks simply by virtue of not having too much resources.
      • esseph 53 minutes ago
        > its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable

        It's rarely been the citizens that have been the problem, but the governments and companies that seek the use the network connection for their overwhelming benefit.

        • fastball 11 minutes ago
          wat. The protections in place that the OP is talking about are almost entirely due to (not government and company) bad actors.
    • notenlish 15 minutes ago
      Nearly every single website I'm not logged into these days want me to "confirm I'm not a bot".

      it is incredibly annoying but what can you do? AI scrapers ruined the web.

    • rayiner 58 minutes ago
      Wow I’m glad it’s not just me. I thought my IP block had gotten caught up in some known spamming or something.
    • tosti 1 hour ago
      I get exactly none of that. Is your adblocker still working?
    • oybng 1 hour ago
      renders your gigabit connection pointless
  • Telaneo 52 minutes ago
    Glorious. Really looking forward to seeing how much better than AV1 it actually turns out to be. It's a shame it'll take a while before we'll have a decent encoder (it took an annoyingly long time until SVT-AV1 was usable).
  • Zopieux 1 hour ago
    >video decoder implementation

    >look inside

    >it's C

    • tux3 1 hour ago
      Not just C, dav1d and dav2d are actually mostly written in ASM! Then there's a bit of C as the glue or for functions that don't have optimized ASM yet.

      Since dav2d is newer it has a higher fraction of C, but not enough for it to be the main language in the codebase :)

    • Almondsetat 47 minutes ago
      What are you even implying?
      • notenlish 19 minutes ago
        I think they mean that video decoders and encoders tend to have custom assembly code for speedup.
      • IshKebab 14 minutes ago
        That codecs should be written in safer languages given that they usually process untrusted files. There have been a number of serious hacks from file parsing bugs due to them being written in unsafe languages.

        There's literally a DSL designed for this purpose (Wuffs) so it would be interesting to hear why they didn't use it.

      • sergiotapia 17 minutes ago
        muh rust muh safety muh Safe Code
  • kylec 36 minutes ago
    I wonder if the author is a Dave2D fan?

    https://www.youtube.com/@Dave2D

  • sylware 57 minutes ago
    I would even remove the C code and lower the usage of the assembler pre-processor to a basic C pre-processor.

    Happy, AV2 decoding already here.

    :)

  • xnx 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • virtualritz 1 hour ago
      And who ever heard of this in the majority of the world? It was news to me, I'm white and European btw.

      Did you know the US consititues about 4% of humans? When we look at adults and age range that likely ever hear of D4vd we are talking probably considerably less that 1%.

      The rest of humanity has no negative association with these four letters.

      • pesus 54 minutes ago
        It was my first thought when I saw the name, unfortunately. The US constitutes a large portion of this site's user base. Whether the association sticks around is yet to be seen.
      • DaiPlusPlus 1 hour ago
        > And who ever heard of this in the majority of the world? It was news to me, I'm white and European btw.

        It's a recurring headline on the rolling news channels on broadcast TV right now - and it's on the front-page of Reddit for me as well.

        • Almondsetat 1 hour ago
          So a project should change its name because when it will be production ready 6 years from now the 1% of the 1% of the 1% will think for 1 microsecond about a piece of news from today?
          • Lerc 1 hour ago
            Just that remember that there were people that said calling the second LOTR movie The Two Towers was disrespectful.
          • DaiPlusPlus 49 minutes ago
            > So a project should change its nam

            Potentially... supposing the criminal investigation into this uncovers a hitherto unknown organ harvesting scheme operating within the global music records industry; the subsequent police dragnet implicates significant proportion of the world's music stars and record labels and generates continual major headlines and criminal convictions - with all their lurid details - all for multiple decades from now on.

            It's quite ridiculous when I put it that way, but this is basically the same thing as Epstein's network, just with a different crime; and Epstein was already in the news almost 20 years ago from his first conviction.

            ...so back in 2009, back when everyone was building their own social-network websites and online dating services, and supposing your real-name was also Epstein, so you called it "EpsteinLoveIsland.com" - would you have changed the name back then?

        • encom 11 minutes ago
          >news channels on broadcast TV

          So no one below the age of 60 is aware of this.

        • dingdingdang 1 hour ago
          Gotta admit this was the first thing I thought of as well. Hard to focus on the code implementation with that in mind!
    • cosmotic 1 hour ago
      Its a followup to their existing Dav1d decoder (av1, av2)
      • cogman10 1 hour ago
        Which, should be noted, was a thing before d4vd started his career.

        dav1d - started in 2018

        d4vd - started composing in 2021

    • NewsaHackO 1 hour ago
      It's just unfortunate. Like there was a pharmaceutical company named "Isis" that changed their name due to the association with the terrorist group. That said, while people will notice for the next couple of months, I don't think it warrants changing a name for.
    • walrus01 1 hour ago
      By this logic nobody should ever name their child Ted or Theodore because Ted Bundy existed.
  • dcsommer 1 hour ago
    We must not continue to develop media codecs in memory unsafe languages. Small, auditable sections can opt-out perhaps, but choosing default-unsafe for this type of software is close to professional negligence.
    • fguerraz 1 hour ago
      Cryptography and video codecs are notable exceptions, they put a lot of effort to making the code provably memory safe: no recursion, limited use of stack variables, no dynamic allocations, etc. As a result, memory safe languages bring nothing but trouble by making it non deterministic, that’s especially true for crypto where compiler “optimisations” guarantee you side channels attacks.
    • fishgoesblub 54 minutes ago
      Of the 3 software AV1 encoders, the only one that is fully dead is the Rust encoder (rav1e). If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders, they would fund and develop them.
      • vlovich123 13 minutes ago
        Fully dead in what sense? Seems like it still has active development to me.
        • fishgoesblub 11 minutes ago
          It hasn't had any proper quality/speed improvements in years. Only thing that has changed is updating deps and some bug fixes.
      • esseph 51 minutes ago
        > If people truly wanted memory safe encoders/decoders

        Really? How many codecs have your neighbors contributed money for the development of, just curious.

        • Telaneo 38 minutes ago
          Given Netflix's involvement with SV1-AV1, (not even that) indirectly, at least 1.