Among the many head video websites in today's domestic market, Bilibili (hereinafter referred to as B station) can be said to be the most unique one.
On the one hand, the unique bullet screen culture and community atmosphere make B station users generally have a higher degree of activity than other video sites. Whether it is daily community communication or interaction with the platform, the UP owners and viewers of Station B are obviously much more active than the users of "Aiyouteng".
How many people still remember this site and the community atmosphere at the time?
On the other hand, as a website that started with MMD, MAD and other "two-dimensional" two-dimensional video content, Station B has also obviously invested a lot of energy in the diversified development of content and improved its own profitability in recent years. In this process, the collision of ideas between B station and users has naturally become a not uncommon news.
It is true that as a user who has been in contact with the B station since the Mikufans period, we have more complex emotions about the B station today. But because of this, when there are rumors on social media recently that "B station in order to save bandwidth caused users to play experience caton", it naturally also caused us to pay special attention.
It can be seen that the rumors are suspected to have originated from a Weibo account at the earliest. According to the original Bo, Station B forcibly changed the video encoding of the web player to HEVC "in order to save bandwidth", resulting in a high CPU occupancy rate of Ta's computer, and even "1080P soft solution ate nearly two cores".
Further, in several replies to this blog post, we can also see more netizens' views on this matter. Among them, some netizens claimed that the behavior of Station B using HEVC video encoding contrasted with the (more advanced) AV1 video encoding that some other video websites began to deploy.
But the question is, is what these netizens say true?
In order to explore the truth of the matter, we Sanyi Life found the "video involved" based on the screenshot in this blog post ("Chop 1 pound of pig's trotters into 315 small particles" by Sheep Cuisine 2022-03-28), and adjusted to the "1080P high bitrate" resolution option according to the blogger's description.
However, when we right-clicked on the video to view the properties, we found something surprising. Yes, the video of Station B shows that the video being watched at this time uses "av01" encoding.
What is "av01"? In simple terms, in fact, some netizens in the previous article claimed that other video websites have begun to use the AV1 encoding format when "mocking" Station B. Not only that, but in the settings option in the lower right corner of the same video, we also saw such an interface.
First of all, this means that Station B can now provide at least three video encoding formats for users to choose from, H264, HEVC (i.e., H265), and AV1. Therefore, some netizens said that "when other video sites migrated to AV1 encoding, B station is pushing HEVC", in fact, it has been falsified. Station B has also adapted to the most advanced AV1 video encoding technology, not only does not lag behind "other video websites", but may even belong to the group that is more technologically advanced.
Secondly, we can also see that when we open the video mentioned above, Station B is enabled av1 encoding for our computer by default, not the blogger said "forced to change to HEVC", so this article is also partially falsified.
Of course, this is not enough. We also have a question, does the heVC video encoding that this blogger is talking about really lead to forced soft solutions and special "eat performance"?
Obviously, this is not difficult to verify, after all, Station B actually fully supports manual switching of video encoding, re-select an encoding format and refresh the page.
It can be seen that when we switch the video encoding of station B to HEVC format, it is indeed automatic to use soft decoding. The antique graphics card (RX590) on our computer itself has HEVC hard solution capability, but it is not used at this time.
So soft decoding of 1080P high bitrate HEVC video, will it really cause the CPU to be too high? Due to limited conditions, we were unable to find the current mainstream platform, and were "forced" to use two "antique computers" for testing. One is AMD's original Ryzen™ 1700, released in the first quarter of 2017, a full five years ago.
It can be seen that on the Ryzen™ 1700, the "1080P high bitrate" HEVC video online soft solution playback will eat up about 12.7% of the CPU occupancy, that is, almost half the CPU core level. If you convert it to the current 5000 series Ryzen or 12th generation Core, it should be less than 10%, and maybe even less than 5% occupancy.
Some friends may say, maybe this blogger's computer is older? There was a possibility, so we tried an older computer to test it. It can be seen that on the 2015 Core i7-6700K, we soft decoded the 1080P high-bitrate HEVC video of the B station while opening 13 other web pages, and the total CPU usage rate did not exceed 25%. That said, not even one of the physical cores of this "antique" quad-core processor is yet to be used up.
We also tested the 4K high bitrate and AV1 encoding soft solution, and the 8-core CPU was really used up by 36.8%, but it did not stutter at all
At this point, we can basically assert that unless the blogger's computer configuration has been so bad that it is incomparable (such as a dual-core processor that may have been more than a decade ago), or its computer driver and system environment configuration are extremely problematic, otherwise the situation that Ta said that "soft decoding B station HEVC video leads to occupying two cores" is basically unlikely.
Of course, in response to the blogger's statement, there is actually a question, that is, the B station provides a variety of different encoding formats for a video (the original blogger said it was two, but we measured that it was actually AV1, HEVC, H264 three) for what purpose. Is it "to save traffic", as the blogger puts it?
After our testing, at what the blogger calls the "1080P high bitrate" resolution level, the latest AV1 encoded video bitrate is about 1361Kbps, the medium HEVC encoded video bitrate is about 1706Kbps, and the ancient H264 (avc1) encoded video bitrate is about 2221kbps. Yes, the latest video encoding technology does save about 40% of the video bitrate.
Official response: The main purpose of advanced encoding is to improve the image quality and perception, and saving bandwidth is a "side effect".
But the problem is that "the ability to provide the same or even higher definition in a smaller file size" is the most important development direction of the entire video encoding technology. Secondly, more advanced video coding technology can not only play a role in saving bandwidth, but also support higher clarity, higher color depth level, and directly improve the perception of video. Finally, we also proved with actual measurements that at least for the vast majority of mainstream PCs with no problems installed with drivers, even if these video encoding formats are softly decoded, they will not bring too high CPU occupancy problems.
At this point, it can be said that we Sanyi Life has basically "falsified" the Weibo at the beginning of this article and the content in its related replies. But then a new question arises, so why is there such a statement?
【Some of the pictures in this article are from the network】