Vimeo Uses AV1 to Deliver Higher-Quality Video for Less

Vimeo is the video-sharing platform of choice for content creators who care about playback quality. The company is focused on simplifying what’s needed to make, manage and share video from one platform. We spoke with Thomas Daede, a principal video codec engineer at Vimeo, about Vimeo’s AV1 adoption story. Daede is also a member of the AOMedia AV1 video standard community and is deeply versed in video compression.

Leveraging AV1 to Improve Customer Experience

At Vimeo, ensuring a superior consumer experience is paramount. The company has a reputation for providing a high-quality platform, so the expectation is that all users can receive a very high-quality rendition. Vimeo’s highest bit rate encodes have a much higher bit rate than YouTube, for example.

It's important to the company that everyone has access to high-quality video, regardless of their bandwidth limitations: “Vimeo works to ensure all viewers enjoy consistently high-quality video, regardless of bandwidth levels,” said Daede. “We believe that no one should have to compromise on video quality. This is something we have been focused on achieving for our users.

“Vimeo turned to AV1, and, since adopting the codec, has been able to deliver higher-quality video for whatever bandwidth users have,” continued Daede. “Vimeo leverages AV1 to deliver better compression compared to legacy codecs like H.264, and AV1 also helps support features like HDR. Vimeo can seamlessly deliver HDR content with AV1, which is something that can’t be easily done with H.264.”

Since 2019, AV1 video has been available for all videos in Vimeo’s Staff Picks channel, like New York Postcard by the McGloughlin Brothers.

Watch New York Postcard here at https://vimeo.com/844876479.

AV1 Drives Cost Savings

AV1 makes video delivery less expensive and will very soon make storage more affordable.

For a while, big players that have their own content delivery networks (CDN) infrastructure could have access to bandwidth with relatively low cost; for smaller players like Vimeo, the bandwidth cost could have been significant. AV1 offers smaller players reduced bandwidth cost, allowing them to compete with the big players. “For Vimeo, a company that uses CDN providers, the bandwidth savings from AV1 offer a significant cost reduction,” continued Daede.

Storage also presents a major cost. If companies add AV1 and keep H.264, they must store both, and they lose money on storage even though they save on bandwidth. This will improve the moment that H.264 can be removed entirely – using AV1 exclusively will deliver very big savings. As soon as it becomes feasible to completely replace the transcode path, AV1 will start making delivery a lot cheaper and allow providers with less access to the big delivery networks to deliver high-quality video.

AV1’s Suitability for Low-end Mobile Devices

While some have voiced concerns about AV1’s suitability for lower-end mobile devices, the truth is that recent developments are paving the way for long-term AV1 support in this area. First, more lower-end chips now include AV1 decoders. Second, the base Android decoder was replaced with dav1d (VideoLAN's new high-performance AV1 decoder) and that provided a better performance on low-cost phones.

There used to be a resolution limit for playback of AV1 on low-end phones, which limited Vimeo’s payoff for creating AV1 transcodes. Now that those are replaced with dav1d, much higher resolutions can be delivered more consistently. So, while Vimeo has always been able to utilize AV1 on low-end devices, especially at low resolutions, these recent changes have helped simplify this process and will help continue to drive quality improvements.

Vimeo on Other AOMedia Specifications

In addition to AV1, Vimeo also engages in AOMedia audio codec IAMF (an audio packaging format) as well as the AOMedia image format AVIF, which represents 80 percent of Vimeo views. “The vast majority of Vimeo’s image views are AVIF, the AOMedia AV1-based image format. The company has its own image-transcoding stack that uses mostly the same pipeline as its video transcoding. Things like video thumbnails get rendered with the same color-conversion functions and the thumbnails match the video exactly,” noted Daede.

Vimeo on AOMedia Membership

“Vimeo wants to help set the direction that the industry goes, which is increasingly accomplished by working with AOMedia,” said Daede. The company is focused on delivering high-quality video.

“When our videos are embedded, we're beholden to the device makers for what we can deliver, so it's really important for us to have high-quality standards in place,” he added. “For us, having high-quality standards like AV1 is especially critical. Vimeo has seen tremendous benefits from being part of the group that spearheaded AV1 and working with the global leaders who have made it possible.”