AV1 Live Streaming Is Finally Coming To YouTube

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a recent video, YouTuber EposVox reports that YouTube is finally rolling out AV1 live-streaming support to the platform, with the tech currently in a beta. AV1 will provide YouTube live streams with a substantial increase in video quality, and allow users to stream at up to 4K 60FPS with Twitch-limited bitrates. EposVox was able to get early access to a development build of OBS 29.1 to check out YouTube's live streaming AV1 capabilities. The newest addition to the AV1 rollout is YouTube live streaming support with AV1. YouTube just rolled out beta support for a new video live-streaming standard known as Enhanced RTMP, which will allow streamers to utilize several of the latest video codecs, including AV1, VP9, and HEVC (H.265) to live stream videos to YouTube.

EposVox was able to test drive Enhanced RTMP, with a development build of OBS 21.9 to stream AV1 gaming content to YouTube directly. According to EposVox, the quality difference is night and day compared to H.264. The quality jump with AV1, allowed him to drive higher quality video to his live stream, and remove pixelation altogether. Just for perspective on how powerful AV1 is, EposVox was able to run an AV1 1440P 60FPS live stream of Halo Infinite at 500kbps - a bitrate 15x lower than the Twitch limit, and the stream was still perfectly watchable. For normal use cases, EposVox found that 8mbps was the sweet spot for 1440P 60FPS, and around 15mbps for 1440P 60FPS. For a perfectly good-looking live stream with none or close to no pixelization. For users that still want to stream 1080P video, all you'll need is a 4MBps bitrate to achieve the same result. This is a night and day difference to H.264 where 8Mbps was about the minimum you want for a high-quality 1080P 60FPS video stream, and even in this situation, pixelation is still very likely to occur with a lot of streams.

gah, RTMP

[sxpert]

can't they start doing SRT too ?

Re:

[cayenne8]

What is AV1?

Article kept referring to it, but never mentioned what exactly it was?

I'm guessing a codec...but at first sounded like a new camera.

Re:gah, RTMP

[MachineShedFred]

It's a video codec from basically every big tech player, available royalty-free because they got tired of the MPEG-LA's license pool bullshit surrounding H.265 / HEVC.

And when I say basically every big tech player, I mean here are the "governing members":

Amazon
Apple
ARM
Cisco
Facebook
Google
Huawei
Intel
Microsoft
Mozilla
Netflix
Nvidia
Samsung Electronics
Tencent

Notable names among the general members:
Adobe
AMD
Broadcom
Cable Labs
Hulu
LG
Oppo
Realtek
VideoLAN
Western Digital
Xilinx

Basically any large-scale hardware manufacturer that deals with video in some way, and a whole lot of software publishers that make video tools including open source. Oh, and the creators / publishers of MacOS, Windows, and Android. Oh, and all of the GPU manufacturers.

This is the beginning of the end for MPEG-LA.

Re:

[Rockoon]

Its the codec most likely to use the most power because the power efficient coprocessing hardware in your device was more likely than not designed with a different industry standard codec in mind.

Proof reading

[zxcv2212]

"For normal use cases, EposVox found that 8mbps was the sweet spot for 1440P 60FPS, and around 15mbps for 1440P 60FPS" "For users that still want to stream 1080P video, all you'll need is a 4MBps bitrate to achieve the same result" Nice proof reading.

Re:

[Kisai]

Too bad Nvidia, AMD and Intel didn't put encoders in their previous hardware, so that means only people with 40-series Nvidia cards can encode to AV1.

But good news, HEVC means I don't have to encode the video twice (once for Twitch and once for Youtube). Because amazingly enough the HEVC(h265) encoder uses LESS NVENC power than AVC(h264) at the same settings.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Because amazingly enough the HEVC(h265) encoder uses LESS NVENC power than AVC(h264) at the same settings.

I noticed that too. It's true even on my 1070. I tried it with handbrake and it takes less time to make a nice video my TV can decode with h265 than h264.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

All Intel discrete GPUs support AV1 encoding. The base ones are pretty cheap and people have been adding them along side a better gaming card just to handle encoding.

Re:

[Briareos]

AMD's latest RDNA3 cards (RX 7xxx) come with Video Core Next 4.0 [wikipedia.org], which supports both en- and decoding AV1...

Re:

[Briareos]

For once the /. editors are innocent here, that gaff is replicated from TFA.

Yeah, we wouldn't want editors to actually read what they're posting; if they had only given it a bit of thought and noticed that gaffe in their source they might also have put a "(sic!)" in there to signal that - for once - it was not coming from them...

So AV1 is the new hotness?

[King_TJ]

I guess I haven't been following this media transcoding stuff very closely, recently.

The last thing I was familiar with was transcoding content into H.265 to save a lot of disk storage while still getting pretty good results when playing video content back on my Plex media server.

It looks like the latest versions of Handbrake support AV1 encoding now. But I'm a little fuzzy on the status of it for Plex? I keep seeing references to Plex now supporting AV1 in a "home theater PC" edition? But what about the

Re:

[jhutch2000]

The problem isn't really the server at this point. It is clients that support hardware AV1 decoding. Last I checked a few months back, none of the well known hardware clients (Roku,etc) supported AV1 decode yet.

Once you can get a Roku stick that supports full blown AV1 decode to plug into your 4k TV, then AV1 will be ready for Plex prime-time, imo.

Re:

[thegarbz]

The issue isn't the software, it's the hardware. AV1 in software is quite resource intensive. Unless you have a modern RTX4000 series GPU, an Intel ARC GPU, or an RX7000 series GPU you're going to have a bad time encoding AV1 on any platform with any software. Likewise on the playback side. Hardware decoders of AV1 are important for portable devices which would otherwise annihilate their batteries, and unless your TV was made in the past 2 years your chances of playback for AV1 are close to none as well.

As

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

The good news: the onward march of time solves all of that. A future generation of set top boxes (AppleTV, Roku, Nvidia SHIELD, etc.) will likely all support AV1 decoding in hardware - maybe even the next one.

Once that happens, there's going to be a mass-switchover of codec use away from license encumbered bullshit that looks and performs worse, and all of us will be a lot happier. And we can all metaphorically piss on the grave of the MPEG License Association while laughing about how they put the knife t

Re:

[psycho12345]

Indeed. Given both Google and Apple are part of this, expect Android devices to be required to support it (Last I looked, for latest version of Android, it IS required), and Apple to also put it out. That right there covers nearly the entire mobile. That means any new device in the next year or two will support.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

More than that, you have Microsoft, Netflix, AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Cable Labs, Adobe, Realtek, Xilinx on board as members of AOMedia.

That basically also covers every desktop PC, every laptop, most set top boxes / dongles, and every GPU manufacturer worth mentioning across the semiconductor landscape.

Lesson to be learned: don't piss off entire industry sectors that have the ability to work together to design, create, and release competitive products in order to fuck you back to the stone age.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

So you're saying that people won't switch when the barrier to entry is reduced to "buying a product I was going to buy anyway" ?

Guess what, anonymous genius - they're already switching. Thus the fucking article. Individuals won't have to make the decision, as the software they're using will make the change for them.

If you think Apple, Google, Adobe, et. al. are going to continue paying MPEG-LA their ransom fees when they went through the effort of creating a competing and unencumbered product, you're just

Re:

[thegarbz]

Absolutely. I was just pointing out that right now AV1 live streaming support may be of limited use. It will become very relevant in time.

Only AV1 In - Still VP9 Out

[rsmith-mac]

The title is a bit unclear/misleading here. YouTube will start accepting AV1 as an input for live streaming. However everything is still going to get reencoded to VP9 for distribution. So the quality benefits of AV1 are going to be lost for the time being; it'll be no better than uploading in VP9 to begin with.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

There's one benefit of AV1 that won't go away: requiring less upload bandwidth to get your upward stream out without congestion / latency jitter causing quality issues. And since that, by far, is the biggest bottleneck for most streamers, it's still a pretty good advancement in the short term, only getting better as AV1 decoding hardware becomes more prevalent across the ecosystem.

Re:

[thegarbz]

And since that, by far, is the biggest bottleneck for most streamers, it's still a pretty good advancement in the short term, only getting better as AV1 decoding hardware becomes more prevalent across the ecosystem.

Except right now the biggest bottleneck for streamers is the fact that they don't have hardware AV1 encoders. Many streamers run dual systems as well and are none to keen on throwing a RTX40xx or RX7xxx card in just for video encoding. Though Intel's ARC is starting to look compelling in this situation.

Great for X

[markdavis]

>"EposVox found that 8mbps was the sweet spot for 1440P 60FPS, and around 15mbps for 1440P 60FPS"

  8 is the best for X and 15 for X?

Yes, that nonsense is directly from the article.