Analysis of the Emerging AOMedia AV1 Video Coding Format for OTT Use-Cases

To achieve improved quality of service and efficiencies with higher resolution, high dynamic range, and wide color gamut in online media delivery, there is a need for advanced video compression standards. Alliance for Open Media (AOM), a joint development foundation, is targeting AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) as a royalty-free video coding format that is likely to be finalized before the end of 2017. Built on top of Google’s VP9 codec, AV1 has brought in new coding tools from other open source royalty-free codecs. Multiple new royalty-free coding tools have been contributed by the members of AOM. In this paper, we provide an analysis of the coding gains offered by the default and experimental tools in AV1 and the corresponding decoding complexity increase for the over-the-top adaptive bit-rate streaming delivery use-cases. Also, the coding gains are compared against the compression performance of
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264,
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265, and libVP9 open-source codecs to highlight the potential bit savings possible with AV1 using multiple video quality metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio, structure similarity, and Netflix’s Video Multi-Assessment Fusion metric. These results indicate that AV1 offers competitive compression performance over H.265 without significantly increasing the decoding complexity.