Adding AV1 and AVIF file playback on Discord for user uploads

Montec
  • Edited

I am fully aware that this has been posted on three seperate occasions, however no action has been taken.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360049719034

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360062334332
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360050459572

 

AV1 video codec has seen strong adoption from browser, website, hardware side as well as being royalty free. What that means is anyone can use it for free. Here is a list I and others have compiled with reasons for adopting AV1:

1. Highly efficient video compression would help Discord save on bandwidth (over 50% more efficient than h.264)

  1. Higher efficiency means higher quality for the same file size
  2. Adoption for this codec is going strong, all major browsers support it
  3. Webm video file container supports it, so it can be played inside discord
  4. All major internet players are behind it (Google, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, Nvidia, Tencent) http://aomedia.org/membership/members/
  5. It is literally free, so no licensing fees would be required to be paid.
  6. Hardware support is ramping up, all upcoming GPU's will feature hardware based decoding.

 

Another point must be mentioned, and that is AVIF image format that AV1 keyframes are based off. It is many times more efficient than JPEG and offers same pros mentioned above. We strongly encourage for its adoption.

204

Comments

41 comments

Date Votes
  • Sr. Robot

    Can someone from Discord at least acknowledge this issue exists, and that they're either working on it (or not)? I think it's time to publicly call out the lack of respect from the Discord team to their users of what's obviously a popular feature request. This lack of traction is getting exhausting, and having this site as a "black hole" isn't helping with company optics.

    Electron supports AV1 under the hood, all major desktop and mobile browsers support AV1 playback (except Safari, but who cares about a browser that willingly ignores supporting open standards). Worst case scenario, Discord can fall back to providing a download link for lagging browser environments.

    Moreover, Discord does currently provide AVIF support under the hood already. When you upload an AVIF image, you do get a visual preview of the image, but once it's uploaded it goes away. This is just sloppy behavior: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/12134335517079-Fix-AVIF-image-previews

    Again, what's the use of a suggestion website that doesn't listen to their customers? Beats me.

    6
  • Mine18
    • Edited

    This is what happens when discord prioritizes Nitro, features which help non-nitro users get shafted for stupid garbage like minigames and User submitted feedback is ignored.

    3
  • RealNC

    OK, so AV1 support just dropped. They said they'll support AVIF when Discord can encode to AV1. So maybe they'll finally add it now?

    1
  • Chechecoolay

    RealNC No AV1 support has not dropped its only for discord streams and only supported by RTX 4080's and 4090's and no support for intel arc GPU/amd 7000 GPUs what so ever, for clarification we are talking about av1 videos in the channel chat and avif photos.

    2
  • Sr. Robot
    • Edited

    I'm a man of action, and I'm withholding my Nitro subscription renewal due to how bad my support experience was with getting some kind of answer about this ticket. It's a drop in the bucket, but it's the least I can do.

    The current status quo is unacceptable.

    4
  • Maikurosofuto

    Day 1024: Streaming in AV1 has been a thing for a couple months now, although not even a mention of AV1 playback.

    1
  • Mine18

    Keep in mind, Streaming is only for Nvidia RTX40 GPUs. So even that aspect is sloppily put together, as it should support all GPUs that have av1 encoding.

    0
  • mcsy
    • Edited

    Embed! It's fine if unsupported platforms show them as an attachment, just like how it worked with VP9 (webm) videos on iOS before they became supported natively. But both AVIF and AV1 have been supported on many, many Electron versions now.

    1
  • RealNC

    Apparently Discord prefers it when we upload 25MB h264 videos instead of a 5MB AV1 video?

    3
  • Mine18

    They prefer it when you buy Nitro for larger file sizes.

    1
  • RealNC

    Buying Nitro won't fix my slow upload speed though. So larger file size limits don't help me much.

    1

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