When is AV2 coming?

18:51And let's go to our Floridian Jeff. Jeff? So this is pretty interesting and there's funny timing with this. I'll show you this first article which says, no I don't want to show you that one, let me show you this one, because in early 2025 they said, hey according to the Alliance for Open Media, we expect this by the end of 2025. Well that didn't happen, so let's get rid of that.

19:17Now they say, wow, this is happening pretty quickly. It was just released in June of 2026. Look how fast things are moving. So relative standard there. However, this seems fascinating, what they talk about for this AV2 codec. First of all, it's free, so no royalty issues there. The Open Media Alliance, Google has already showed this on Chrome. It's not supported in Chrome yet, but they've shown it playing in Chrome.

19:47and a lot of great things on paper, 30% greater compression efficiency than AV1, so this is pretty cool. They've said it's going to be in Chrome, and they say here that it's going to start, YouTube's going to start supporting it. Problem is, as they point out, currently at least there's no hardware support. It's just will-be software support initially. Now, Captain Obvious here drew us a diagram on this website

20:15site in case any of this would be unclear to you. If you want something that is production deployment ready and mature, use the one that is ready and mature. And then if you only want to evaluate, they suggest that you just evaluate the one that's new. So I'll give you a link if you need this diagram. Now, don't be mistaken, as I just was, for a hardware device that, you know,

20:41says AV2, but it's a field recorder from Tascam, audio recorder. So that doesn't apply. But it's very fascinating nonetheless. Courtney? Yeah, until something becomes a standard, everybody has to support it. And that's the problem. FFmpeg is still emerging as AV2 encoding. And it's all CPU-based. Intel is considering putting it, building it into their chips because all their chips for the past, I don't know,

21:08seven or eight generations have HEVC and H.264 hardware encoding built onto the chip itself, acceleration for that. So they're thinking of incorporating AV2 encoding into the next round of chips, but they're not out yet. And I don't know what Apple's plans are for putting a hardware AV2 encoder into their chipset. So if you're just watching the show live, you know, or if you're actually, more importantly, if you're just watching the show on YouTube,

21:43maybe, you know, some random Thursday afternoon, you're missing half the show. So if you go to this QR code and go to officehours.global slash join, you can get access to our backend Q&A system, how a lot of the questions are coming in. There's other ways. But there's also like a backend chat, a whole bunch, there's a whole community of people involved there. So

22:05You may want to consider doing that. You really are missing half the show. Alexander, let's go to the next question. This one's coming in from Daniel Patridge in Rochester, Minnesota. When do you decide it is a good time to update the software on your mixers and stage boxes? What do you do, Alexander? You know, when it's not a good time is the day before a show.