2019-08-21, 17:18
Update
I resolved the remaining issues and released the first alpha version:
Some background information (for those who are interested in the technical details):
AV1
Since mid 2018, there is a new video codec called AV1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1). It's a royalty-free codec, which means that you don't have to pay patent holders in order to use it. For h264 and h265 (HEVC) Vimeo has to pay fees in order to use the codec. This also affects browser vendors like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. So every major video platform on the web and every browser vendor has a big incentive to move to the AV1 codec, since it saves money big time. Vimeo is one of those platforms: they already ship a lot of AV1 encoded videos.
But the AV1 codec is only one year old, thus there isn't hardware support yet. That's one of the reasons why Kodi doesn't support AV1 yet: the performance is still lacking (there is stuttering). This should soon change with dav1d (a very fast AV1 decoder).
Vimeo HLS
Vimeo provides HLS streams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming). The Vimeo Kodi plugin is using those streams, since they are adaptive (the quality adjusts itself to the available bandwitdh).
But Vimeo already offers AV1 streams in their HLS playlists. Kodi tries to select those, but since the Vimeo HLS servers don't support AV1 codec in HLS yet, they simply return 404 HTTP errors. This shouldn't be an issue, but the underlying ffmpeg library doesn't handle those errors correctly and stops the playback (instead of using the working AVC1 streams). See issue https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/16514. In addition, Kodi can't play AV1 streams yet.
So as a workaround, the plugin downloads the HLS playlists, removes all advertised AV1 streams, and returns the edited playlist to Kodi.
Kodi AV1 support
I already managed to compile Kodi with ffmpeg 4.2 and dav1d 0.2.2. It works nicely. But it will take some time until Kodi ships with an AV1 decoder (I hope it will be in Kodi v19).
I resolved the remaining issues and released the first alpha version:
- Release: https://github.com/jaylinski/kodi-addon-....0-alpha.1
- Built Add-on: https://github.com/jaylinski/kodi-addon-....vimeo.zip
Some background information (for those who are interested in the technical details):
AV1
Since mid 2018, there is a new video codec called AV1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1). It's a royalty-free codec, which means that you don't have to pay patent holders in order to use it. For h264 and h265 (HEVC) Vimeo has to pay fees in order to use the codec. This also affects browser vendors like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. So every major video platform on the web and every browser vendor has a big incentive to move to the AV1 codec, since it saves money big time. Vimeo is one of those platforms: they already ship a lot of AV1 encoded videos.
But the AV1 codec is only one year old, thus there isn't hardware support yet. That's one of the reasons why Kodi doesn't support AV1 yet: the performance is still lacking (there is stuttering). This should soon change with dav1d (a very fast AV1 decoder).
Vimeo HLS
Vimeo provides HLS streams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming). The Vimeo Kodi plugin is using those streams, since they are adaptive (the quality adjusts itself to the available bandwitdh).
But Vimeo already offers AV1 streams in their HLS playlists. Kodi tries to select those, but since the Vimeo HLS servers don't support AV1 codec in HLS yet, they simply return 404 HTTP errors. This shouldn't be an issue, but the underlying ffmpeg library doesn't handle those errors correctly and stops the playback (instead of using the working AVC1 streams). See issue https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/16514. In addition, Kodi can't play AV1 streams yet.
So as a workaround, the plugin downloads the HLS playlists, removes all advertised AV1 streams, and returns the edited playlist to Kodi.
Kodi AV1 support
I already managed to compile Kodi with ffmpeg 4.2 and dav1d 0.2.2. It works nicely. But it will take some time until Kodi ships with an AV1 decoder (I hope it will be in Kodi v19).
