r/AV2

The AV2 spec is out, and I've heard very little in terms of actual adoption. AFAIK there is no talk of AV2 support in any browsers yet, and no support in VLC. I think there is preliminary support in FFMPEG, but I'm not 100% on that.

How close are us nerdy early-adopters to being able to play an AV2 clip?

I wanted AV2 streams to test decoders with, and the only official conformance streams I found are commercial. So I encoded some myself with AVM, the AV2 reference encoder, using clips from the official AV2 test set.

Available now: three low-resolution clips (270p, a vertical 270x480, and 360p), each at three quality levels (QP 110, 160 and 210). Each stream comes with an MD5 of its decoded output from the reference decoder, so you can check whether another decoder produces the same frames.

Caveats:

• These aren't official conformance streams. AV2 is still changing, so they're tied to the AVM commit they were made with.
• They were built on Windows without TensorFlow Lite, which means two encoder experiments were off. Details are in the README.
• 720p and 1080p are coming. AVM currently crashes on those resolutions in my Windows build, but working on it.

The Python script that produces everything is included. It builds AVM, downloads only the needed frames of each source clip, and encodes in parallel within a memory budget.

Link: https://github.com/EwoutH/AV2/tree/main/samples

If you try them with dav2d or another decoder, I'd be interested to hear whether the MD5s match.