AV1 is at the Core of Visionular Operations

Visionular provides video encoding and ultra-high-definition solutions to a wide range of clients across a variety of use cases. The company was officially launched in July 2018, shortly after the AV1 standard was released. The founders were heavily engaged in AV1 standard development, and Visionular’s launch was intentionally tied to the AV1 timeline. We sat down with co-founder, president and CTO Zoe Liu to learn more about how the company utilizes AV1 and its role in ensuring a superior client experience.

Delivering Power and Versatility

The AV1 standard has always been at the center of Visionular’s work, and it provides the basis of the company’s flagship product, the Aurora1 AV1 encoder. Visionular also provides encoders and streaming solutions for the H.264/AVC and HEVC standards.

“Visionular developed its AV1 encoder to be able to run it — and potentially deploy it — on a wide array of devices, framework architectures and operating systems. The AV1 standard helps the company deliver a powerful and versatile product that can be utilized in a wide range of scenarios, with a wide range of technologies,” explained Liu.

With AV1 at its core, Aurora1 covers all the use cases for video sharing and distribution, including premium video-on-demand (VOD), live streaming, real-time communications (RTC) for distance learning and video conferencing, as well as website image optimization using AVIF. The encoder supports Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, and it can run Intel x86 and ARM architecture.

As a result of the work that was completed with early customers, Aurora1 is now capable of streaming 1080p 30fps+ high-motion video in real time with superior bandwidth savings at the same objective and subjective quality as other encoding solutions. Visionular has launched Aurora1 commercially with multiple customers and is collaborating with nearly a dozen engineering teams to extend AV1 to a wider market.

However, for Visionular, its relationship with AV1 goes beyond the Aurora1 product. "There are a lot of connections between our team and the AV1 standard," said Liu. "We really see it as the company’s foundation, and AV1 as a standard and a community is incredibly important to us. We consider it our job and responsibility to contribute to ongoing AV1 development and to help push the standard forward even more."

AV1 Driving Performance Across Markets

While some felt AV1 was slow when it first hit the scene in 2018, today that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In recent years, Visionular has launched several real-time communications and low delay and low bandwidth use cases for customers. In fact, Thomas Davies, Distinguished Engineer at Visionular, gave a talk at the popular RTC @Scale conference on developing a practical RTC solution for AV1.

The company optimized Aurora1 – which is utilized by certain iPhone models and the Mac Mini, among other technologies – against a public benchmark. It uses a single CPU core to allow the Aurora1 to run real-time encoding of 1080p 30fps videos for both screen content and camera content in real-time.

With demand for AV1 expanding, Visionular is collaborating with video-sharing services that have significant viewership in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where consumption is almost exclusively on lower-end mobile phones that impose strict requirements on the decoder's performance and power consumption. Here is where the superior compression efficiency that is possible with AV1 really shines. Bandwidth is low, and this means the video encoder must deliver the highest quality and resolution possible at the lowest bit rate. Visionular was able to demonstrate that AV1-based Aurora1 could reduce bandwidth by more than 20% on typical high-motion sports videos, when compared with current bitstreams, and deliver a good video experience as low as 150kbps. This then translates into cost savings and improvement in video experience for the end user.

AV1 in Action

Visionular brought up an interesting use case for AV1 with a customer in the defense sector . In this example, the customer was using drones to fly high up in the air and record what they were seeing. They needed to capture video and transmit those videos back to the ground in real-time, to show those on the ground what was viewable from the air. In addition to conquering the real-time challenge, the customer was also confronted with the issue of low bandwidth — at times it was lower than 100 kilobits per second. Despite these significant hurdles, the client wanted to see good-quality video shared instantly from the drones. They launched using Visionular’s Aurora AV1 and were able to deliver clear video imagery to those on the ground as it was being recorded in the sky. This is a clear indication of Aurora1’s capability to support ultra-low-bitrate (sub-100 kbps) and ultra-low latency live streaming requirements.

The Value of the AOMedia Community

“One immediate benefit of AOMedia membership is the recognition we get from other members, many of which are well-known global brands,” continued Liu. “Visionular is a startup, so being in the same arena as some of those bigger brands carries huge benefits in terms of recognition, partnership building, gaining new customers and just generally expanding our network. We are small, but it’s like being in a big family.”

In addition to brand and network building, AOMedia also offers significant technology benefits. “There are so many discussions and opportunities to learn about market trends and what other members are encountering,” Liu added. She noted that the numerous AV1 use cases presented by AOMedia members provide immeasurable validation for potential customers who may have some skepticism around the codec. “AOMedia members have built the ecosystem, and that ecosystem is critical for driving the future of AV1 and advanced encoders,” she explained. “The whole ecosystem is supported by the AOMedia effort.

“Without AOMedia, there is no base for us,” Liu concluded. “We feel really lucky because we chose AV1 from the beginning, and it is AOMedia that has laid the foundation for our product and supported our advancement.”