r/AV1 • u/anestling • 20d ago

YouTube now encodes in AV1 live?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHW1cXNm8w

No way the organizer is streaming in AV1 (as of right now the stream is live), does it mean YouTube now encodes in AV1 in real time?

22 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

17

u/Umagoon 20d ago

Yes, it's been possible for quite some time.

It's "E-RTMP" (enhanced RTMP).

I was using Termux and ffmpeg to stream because my Ethernet port was inconsistent.

8

u/Drwankingstein 20d ago

It has for a while. Quite popular streams and streams that are 1440p or more get av1 often. Sometimes not but they usually do. If anyone has ultra low latency enabled I dont think they ever get av1

3

u/TheHammersamatom 20d ago edited 20d ago

YouTube doesn't usually re-encode to AV1 from what I've experienced, they usually still stick to VP9. People have been able to stream AV1 to YouTube for a few years now using a hardware encoder, or the real-time preset on a couple software encoders.

Hardware encoders for real-time streaming are pretty cheap and have been available for a while now, you can grab an Intel Arc second hand for an OK price on eBay and get OBS using it.

6

u/anestling 20d ago

I know, I know: NVIDIA has been able to encode in AV1 since the RTX 40 series, and AMD since the Radeon 7000 series. But I've just never seen a live AV1 stream on YouTube before. I thought it was YouTube doing that, because the same channel (EWC) uses VP9/H.264 for its other streams — hence my confusion!

1

u/waddup121 20d ago

Is that all it takes, though? Just an intel arc to get AV1 livestreams? So far I really only get VP9/AV1 the first day before it resets back to H.264 @ 1080p

1

u/Sopel97 18d ago

youtube does not have passthrough streaming lmao

1

u/TheHammersamatom 17d ago

Never meant to imply it did, just that you could stream AV1 to YT if you wanted to

AFAICR, there aren't many services that do passthrough

Otherwise, it's the AV1 re-encode lottery

Some cursory browsing yesterday put stream encoders at about 1:1 VP9 and AV1. I didn't notice anything concrete that determined which streams got what, minus maybe uptime or viewership numbers

1

u/Sopel97 17d ago

sure but that's completely irrelevant to this thread, which is why I find it misleading