AV1 Decoder Benchmarking on Android Devices

Last year, Meta announced that > 70% of all video bits delivered globally were AV1. I was one of the engineers that worked on this project. As ~10% of global Android devices have HW AV1, we had to rely on SW decoding. Further complicating the work, ~50% of global devices would be classified as low tier; sub-$200 devices, and many are sub-$100. To reach our internal goal for AV1 reach, we had to get AV1 on as many $100 devices as possible, while avoiding the ones that would have a bad user experience with either poor battery life, thermal events, and/or excessive frame drops. We established buckets based on AV1 levels, and then ran benchmarks to bucket devices in one of 4 buckets: no AV1, AV1 level 3.1, AV1 level 4.0, AV1 level 4.1. The AV1 buckets roughly equate to 720p 30fps, 1080p 30fps, and 1080p 60fps respectively. We ran battery drain benchmarks on a set of representative devices by looping video playback for 16 hours or until battery shutdown. The expectation was that... Read more