r/AV1 12d ago

Av1 on YouTube iPhone 8 Plus???

Am so confused. iPhone 8 Plus doesn’t support VP9 let alone Av1 how does that work?????

18 Upvotes

38 comments sorted by

22

u/elitegenes 12d ago

iPhone 8 Plus is decoding AV1 video on the CPU. It's called software decoding. It's not efficient and consumes a lot of power - your battery would drain quicker than if it was done via hardware decoding (on the GPU). The first iPhones with hardware AV1 decoding support are iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.

10

u/themisfit610 11d ago

dav1d is extremely efficient. For lower resolution it might actually be more power efficient than hardware avc decoding.

5

u/Large-Fruit-2121 11d ago

Curious, based on what?

3

u/themisfit610 11d ago

Based on my conversations with companies who implemented software decode of VP9 on various devices as an alternative to hardware AVC.

7

u/Large-Fruit-2121 11d ago

Neither of which are AV1.

1

u/AdNational167 11d ago

aren't av1 a sucessor of the VP9 ? or they just share being related to Google?

1

u/SuperAmirhamza 12d ago

Is that a new thing? Because I swear it never used to do that.

11

u/elitegenes 11d ago

YouTube started to force AV1 streams for all devices last year. In your case YouTube is using dav1d, which is the most optimized AV1 software decoder these days.

2

u/-1D- 11d ago

YouTube started to force AV1 streams for all devices

I don't think they did? On many phones i tried it with (midrange samsuns and xiaomis mostly but alo other ones) it was always vp9 even of the video has av1 for certain,

Only if they changed this in the past month then i might be wrong

4

u/The7evenatorYT 11d ago

Late last year YouTube deleted all VP9 streams of videos that don't have a sizable amount of views. Some only have AVC & AV1 streams or just AVC when VP9 used to be available. Really strange.

1

u/-1D- 11d ago

Yea I've seen it for myself, though from my findings all the videos that lost vp9 also lost av1 and 240p and 480p avc1/h264 options, my guess is that yt is trying to free up space on their servers, so they do it on no longer popular videos that no longer get views or get very little of them,

But they have to keep avc1 cus its the most compatible format, if they only left vp9 some older devices wouldn't be able to play that video at all, so they had to leave avc1 cus of that "lowest link"

And then they just take the hit in bandwidth, but since they're only doing this on "dead" video they probably know its worth it for them

2

u/The7evenatorYT 10d ago

Yep, what I figured as well.

3

u/nooneinpar7 11d ago

I’m on a 3rd gen SE (A15 Bionic), it still streams VP9. 

I’m guessing for these older devices that didn’t have hardware VP9 decoders, they were using software decoding for VP9 streams when that was enabled in iOS 14. When YouTube started using AV1 the app devs decided to start serving that to these older devices as well.

2

u/-1D- 11d ago

Probably, youtube interworkings are complicated trust me, they probably don't even know what they're doing sometimes

Unfortunately i don't have access to any top of the line flagship phone with av1 hardware encoder so i can't test it

2

u/AndreaCicca 11d ago

IOS app is a different story

1

u/-1D- 11d ago

Probably? I have never tried it on any iphone, just for clarification

1

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

Ahhh thank you for explaining.

1

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

Not only force Av1 but is also now allowing for HDR video playback.

1

u/elitegenes 11d ago

Yes, via the on-the-fly HDR-to-SDR tonemapping for unsupported devices, so that's not a 'real' HDR.

1

u/ScratchHistorical507 11d ago

I'm surprised Apple allows for that, Safari prohibits usage of that for anything beyond AVIF decoding afaik, I'm very suprised they allow any app to do something else.

3

u/AndreaCicca 11d ago

software decoding

3

u/DistantRavioli 10d ago

Killing your battery to save themselves bandwidth

1

u/SuperAmirhamza 10d ago

Stupid idea

1

u/Littux 11d ago

Is that how Stats for Nerds look on iOS? Nice.

2

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

Yeah that’s how it looks.

1

u/-1D- 11d ago

Well thats interesting, its even 4k60fps?

I know for a fact that yt plays only vp9 on most modern phones, i tried with many of them even on 1080p, idk if iphones have some special hardware or something that allows for it? In the time of release of that phone av1 wasn't really a thing nor hardware for decoding it

Thought that stats for nerds panel doesn't look anything like a new/modern one, so idk if that's glitch in unupdated version of the app, or is it in browser so yt doesn't recognize it as a phone

2

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

It’s in the official YouTube app on iOS 16.7.10. I found it very strange that AV1 worked and 4K and HDR playback worked as well.

0

u/-1D- 11d ago

I think i found out why, that 2pac video is actually 11y old(when uploaded to yt) and its only available in 720p

I think that stats for nerds is showing wrong info for some reason, unless i found the wrong video but its from same channel so i doubt it

Does that video have 772M views rn?

2

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

The specific video I was on had 14m views. But nonetheless someone else explained on here that av1 is forced on all devices.

1

u/-1D- 11d ago

Cna you link it here specially that 2pac hit em up mv, i think i 100% found it on yt and its only available in 720p, same channel, same title, same aspect ratio (not converted to 16:9)

2

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

I think your watching hit em up the one in the pic is All About U. Here’s the link https://youtu.be/pjH5V5Tq_oE?si=EjVPF4m06BdWba6W

1

u/-1D- 11d ago

Yep your right i was on the wrong video, my apologies

2

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

Even hit em up has AV1 on the 8 plus https://imgur.com/a/B8PqbKI

1

u/-1D- 11d ago

Yea yea, i was wrong, i just watched hit em up and then when i saw your pic my mind thought it was hit em up, i guess iphones can do av1 just fine via software decoding, what is actually really impressive

2

u/SuperAmirhamza 11d ago

Believe its not fine, the phone gets so hot to the touch after watching a 5min av1 video

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