Hardware Accelerated AV1 Video reqs outlined by Microsoft

[HEXUS]

Users will need an Intel Iris Xe, Nvidia Ampere, or AMD Navi 2X GPU for AV1 hardware decode.

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[chj]

Whilst the saving in bandwidth is impressive, i'd like to see how easy it is to playback and encode compared to say HVEC or H264 since my plex server is basically a potato.

[Kato-2]

Whilst the saving in bandwidth is impressive, i'd like to see how easy it is to playback and encode compared to say HVEC or H264 since my plex server is basically a potato.

You wouldn't be using AV1 in such a scenario, it's primary usage is for streaming services.

Home users are not going to be generating AV1 video nor is the 'scene' at least not any time soon.

There is a home PC encoder called SVT, but it's only for experts at this time, it's obviously more computationally expensive so will be slower than H.264. Further optimization work may see it integrated into the likes of Handbrake.

For average home users something like Nvdia NVENC hardware encoder getting AV1 support is the likely usage case, maybe another 2 years away perhaps.

[kellyharding]

Until ffmpeg gets AV1 support, Plex won't support it generally. One day they might add AMD/Radeon acceleration to Plex, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Where AV1 is likely to be of more importance is if and when 8K streaming takes off, which given TVs cost 10000s of quid atm, isn't going to be anytime soon, of course it will help with 4K too, which will gradually become more popular, especially with the new consoles (which in theory should be able to support AV1 as the SoC gpu portion is based on rdna2, but depends if Microsoft/Sony implement it).