Dav2d
126 points by dabinat 3 hours ago | 44 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/
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delfinom 49 minutes ago
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Telaneo 42 minutes 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.
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walrus01 38 minutes 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...
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Telaneo 33 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.
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walrus01 45 minutes 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.
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asveikau 54 seconds 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.
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tensor 2 hours 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"
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thresh 59 minutes 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.

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port11 2 hours ago
The internet is such a Tragedy of the Commons… its citizens that act selfishly and in bad faith will slowly make it unusable.
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codedokode 32 minutes ago
No, it is because citizen allow treating them like this.
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esseph 28 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.

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honktime 2 hours 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
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throw-the-towel 44 minutes ago
The commons in question is the internet itself.
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amusingimpala75 50 minutes ago
Thank you for describing the tragedy of the commons
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multjoy 22 minutes ago
The commons were never unregulated. This is a tragedy of enclosure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

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dyauspitr 39 minutes 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.

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throw-the-towel 37 minutes 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.
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rayiner 33 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.
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tosti 2 hours ago
I get exactly none of that. Is your adblocker still working?
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oybng 56 minutes ago
renders your gigabit connection pointless
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kylec 11 minutes ago
I wonder if the author is a Dave2D fan?

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

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Telaneo 27 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).
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Zopieux 2 hours ago
>video decoder implementation

>look inside

>it's C

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tux3 52 minutes 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 :)

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Almondsetat 22 minutes ago
What are you even implying?
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sylware 32 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.

:)

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xnx 2 hours ago
[flagged]
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virtualritz 2 hours 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.

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pesus 29 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.
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DaiPlusPlus 2 hours 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.

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Almondsetat 59 minutes 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?
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Lerc 53 minutes ago
Just that remember that there were people that said calling the second LOTR movie The Two Towers was disrespectful.
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DaiPlusPlus 20 minutes ago
Hollywood retitles movies based on books all the time[1], for the silliest of reasons ("Sorcerer's Stone" was contemporaneous to LOTR too); so given there's precedent, it follows that those wanting to retain the original title from the books should defend their position.

[1] https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/book-movie-titl...

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DaiPlusPlus 24 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?

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dingdingdang 2 hours ago
Gotta admit this was the first thing I thought of as well. Hard to focus on the code implementation with that in mind!
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cosmotic 2 hours ago
Its a followup to their existing Dav1d decoder (av1, av2)
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cogman10 56 minutes ago
Which, should be noted, was a thing before d4vd started his career.

dav1d - started in 2018

d4vd - started composing in 2021

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NewsaHackO 2 hours 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.
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walrus01 53 minutes ago
By this logic nobody should ever name their child Ted or Theodore because Ted Bundy existed.
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dcsommer 59 minutes 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.
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fguerraz 43 minutes 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.
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fishgoesblub 29 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.
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esseph 26 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.

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Telaneo 13 minutes ago
Given Netflix's involvement with SV1-AV1, (not even that) indirectly, at least 1.
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