"Too Many Requests"

- https://web.archive.org/web/20260531130034/https://jbkempf.c...

- https://archive.md/ln5UE

'AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1 decoding. In practice, that means software running on today’s hardware will struggle to decode AV2 in real time without careful, architecture-specific optimization'

AV1 software decoding is already very intensive so AV2 decoding benchmarks are the next thing that would be really interesting (or mortifying) to see.

A codec spec isn't done until there is at least one decoder developed in the field. So reference + 1. The field implementations often become the de facto spec.

Reading the MPEG1 specs back in the 90s as a child opened my eyes to how to define complex systems. For a media coding standard, they spent most of their time saying how to interpret encoded bytes, which I realized is genius. Be descriptive about decoding and you don't have to be prescriptive about encoding. Encoding is where you can apply all the creativity, but you need to provide a way to have a shared understanding of the encoded bytes.

I'm not quite convinced a 25% reduction in size is worth effectively obsoleting all devices that have hardware decoders for AV1 but will struggle to decode AV2

Related:

The AV2 Video Standard Has Released (Final v1.0 Specification)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340910

I thought this was about Dave2D

Seems like the blog succumbed to the HN hug of death (`Actioning this file would cause "jbkempf.com//blog/2026/dav2d/" to exceed the per-day file actions limit of 160000 actions, try again later`), is there a copy available somewhere?

  ... improvements around 25% compared to AV1

  AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1 decoding

I'm not sure what these two lines mean or if we can compare them, any help?

Ouch, looks like the HN hug of death struck again. Gives me error 429.

>The reported gains vary depending on the test conditions, but improvements around 25% compared to AV1 are commonly seen

>AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1 decoding.

For the past 8 to 10 years VideoLan are the only guys on the AOM camp who doesn't care about optics and willing to spell out the truth.

>because we did not believe hardware decoding would become available quickly enough, or on enough devices.

The we was basically VideoLAN only. All other members ( at least on the AOM ) thought hardware decoder would be ready by 2019. And we all know how that works out.

> The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly.

HN hug of death

I would love to see comparisons with AV1 on very low bitrates.

When AV1 was first announced, I got the impression the name was chosen partly as a pun/reference/homage to AVI, the classic but outdated format with used to be popular. Then when I saw Dav1d, OK, good way to continue the pun.

But now with AV2 and Dav2d, that completely breaks. Are we eventually going to get AV3/Dav3d and AV4/Dav4d, which will read like Ave/Daved and Ava/Davad? Seems a bit awkward. Was the idea from the start to have the 1 be the version number, and have it specifically be part of the name?

> Make it fast on older desktop, by writing asm for SSSE3+ chips

I guess 5 years ago (around the time when Intel stopped making SSE-only chips) is technically "older", but I wouldn't prioritize avx2 when devices intended for consuming media definitely experience much less pressure to upgrade than workstations…

> Let dav2d be.

This is an odd signoff. Are people having a go at dav2d?

Is there actually a reasonably performing encoder that can compete with the x26* family in real world conditions this time?

If decode is becoming so complicated and expensive the hardware can't handle it, why not just go full neural, send latents, and run decode on tensor cores?

The answer is probably the same as for why not AV2 everything; a lot of hardware couldn't support it today. But in 10 years?

It seems we're running up against fundamental limits of human-engineered video codecs at this point. There might be a lesson in there.

What's next, Dav4d?

Sorry if this sounds naive, but does it make sense to write a codec library in C/ASM considering how well Rust is progressing, especially when, as the author puts it, AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1 decoding?

Is codex working on novel decoders 24/7? I hope

Wait until you try d4vid, it's killer.

Not to be confused with Da4vid (world-class hacker and owner of the Black sun) or D4vd (rap artist and alleged murderer)

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D4vd

Ok whose idea was ‘Wiener filtering’

This seems like an interesting case to test AI agents on.

Like we had weird examples like C compilers and Bun. This is a much more interesting example because its highly nontrivial.

AV1 exists, Dav1d exists. Lets see AI take the AV2 spec and Dav1d code and try to make a working high performance AV2 decoder.