This is the slide deck from Nathan Egge's presentation 'Latest Technical and Business Progress with AV1' at NAB. It looks at progress, problems solved over the past year, development work at Mozilla and Xiph.Org, and the encoder and decoder ecosystem that is springing up around AV1
Damn, 15 minutes after getting pointed to your mods the disappointment :)
Also, thanks for all your guides on the thinkpad forums.
Would you mind writing a small idiosyncratic guide about "51nb procurement for dummies"?
Like: Buy one of these models of chassis. These aftermarket batteries. These screens (possibly with aliexpress links). Use this preferred method of ordering. Remember that you also need to procure (ram, wifi, ssd).
I was lucky enough to have a chinese collegue who dealt with everything for me (I sent him the taobao link and gave him cash, next time he visited family he brought me my board). Without that I would have been lost.
(seriously, taobao? no way to enter a non-chinese address? Take my money already! There must be somebody in China who wants to make a quick $50 per item for just reshipping 51nb boards to the West, e.g. via aliexpress or ebay, instead of imposing on the time of hackers / hardware engineers who have better things to do than reshipping packages)
The problem with any specific process or link recommendations is they become obsolete instantly. Putting one of these together requires some searching and active exception handling.
There are Chinese services that do forwarding (I use FSC), as well as enthusiast engineers, like Jacky (or me), but enthusiasts get overwhelmed quickly... it becomes a full time job for little or no profit. I have to consciously dial way back to keep this only a hobby so it stays fun.
I know, and I am super grateful for all the cool things you and the other people in the scene develop, and for the effort you go to to actually ship out modkits. You do what's fun and I won't ask for more.
Don't get me wrong, putting together my x62 from your and other's guides was fun. I am just wishing that some of the Shenzen hardware hackers had an entrepreneurial cousin or friend who made a business out of this. I wish I could just send an aliexpress link to all my friends who rightfully complain about lenovo design quality nosediving.
Echoing Geoff's article, I'm a big fan of the 51nb mobos from the X62 on. The X62 was very very good, and the T70 and X210 are even better. Can't wait for the X63.
One reason I'm taking time off from making X62 backlight kits is to make some new mods for the latest machines-- a 13" 3k screen and internal battery. I've gotten both running, but it takes time to work kinks out of production.
It's also why I've been working on my microscope. :-)
Because Jarek is frankly out of line, and I see no reason to sugarcoat it.
Google pissed him off (and I'm sure he has reason to be pissed) but he's not exactly being truthful about what happened, or what is happening.
Being angry at Big Bad Company for a good reason does not give an engineer license to bend the truth any damn way he feels, and it certainly doesn't give license to just make shit up. He's lost some of my respect for a good reason, and if an Avengers reference offends him (or you) it's not my problem.
The entropy coder in AV1 right now is Daala_EC. It's the entropy coder because we measured it directly against rANS and the other candidate encoders and it performed the best.
Hell, you can check out the code, build with the different entropy coders, and test it yourself.
Already done. The claims are not based on speculations, but on numbers coming from verifiable benchmarks with "https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench" including the Daala_EC and the AOM AV1 entropy coder.
Not useless, just not as good as Jarek liked to claim. It's a neat technique but hardly a breakthrough. In the end, for AV1, Daala_EC was better.
As for 'needed a defensive patent', need is the wrong word. In the current patent game, you pile up defensive patents to be used in aggregate as part of a MAD-style game. It sounds insane and it is-- but it's also currently the least insane option.
In any case, Google isn't technically in the wrong here. They're not patenting jarek's work, they're patenting improvements they made to it that were necessary to use it in AV1, which they dedicated engineers to do because Jarek declined to do it himself. Only after Google put in that work (and implemented multiple suggested improvements on top of it to try to bring its performance up) could we even measure the results.
But just because Google isn't wrong, doesn't mean they weren't assholes. Having negotiated with them for things in the past, they will promise the moon and the sun and the sky, and commit only to the parts that get them what they want. I can fully believe they verbally promised Jarek far more than he got.
Yes. We still have internal investment is many pieces of Daala that didn't get adopted in AV1. I don't know the liklihood that Daala will rise again as a standalone codec project... possible, wouldn't bet on it.
