How Meta Deploys and Benchmarks AV1 on Android
In the benchmarking processes for Android platforms to assess their capabilities for decoding and playing streaming video codecs, the primary challenge is the fragmentation of Android specifications. Streaming Learning Center’s Jan Ozer speaks to Meta’s Hassene Tmar about his team’s experience deploying, ramping up reach, and contending with device diversity when delivering AV1 video to its vast array of Android customers. Tmar explains the exhaustive benchmarking work the team members did to test compatibility and how they came to develop their own benchmarking solution in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2025.
Measuring Cycles
Streaming Learning Center Owner and Streaming Media Contributing Editor Jan Ozer asks Meta Technical Program Manager Hassene Tmar about the benchmarking that Meta does on the Android platforms and how that work informs decision-making about which codec viewers are watching.
“Android has definitely been the most challenging platform to deploy everyone on,” Tmar admits. He attributes this to the fragmentation of the specifications for Android phones. His team simplified its response to this challenge by doing an offline analysis on the decoder. Any ARM processor can be used, and Tmar’s team started with Mac Minis. “[W]e go down to the Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi, and then we just run a decode and we measure the cycles” to estimate energy usage, Tmar shares. “It’s been published in multiple papers that measuring cycles gives you a close to linear correlation with energy. And so that was a good proxy for us,” he explains.
After that, “we found that things like the fast decode recipes or decreasing the [number] of cycles that the decoder would use significantly down to further 25% down,” which earned a rave of being “super awesome” from Tmar.
Battery Tests
The team used the open-source libdav1d decoder, which Tmar praises as doing “a great job in optimizing further all of the subroutines into NEON assembly. And that helps significantly. They use the latest and greatest versions of NEONs when available.” Tmar calls that a good starting point.
Battery tests revealed that even low-cost Android phones could run videos for extended periods: “So we take a bunch of streams, we use some open-source tools like VLC Benchmark, and then we basically run the video for hours and hours and we found that an $80 Android phone could … decode and run video for more than 16, 17 hours and so on, and it still has battery to go. We were happily surprised with that and we thought, ‘Let’s keep going.’”
Meta’s Own Benchmarking Tool
Tmar’s team recently partnered with the Ittiam team to build an augmented benchmarking tool on top of VLC Benchmark called VCAT. The tool was introduced by Tmar’s colleague David Ronca in a LinkedIn post. Tmar and his team are hoping “that this benchmarking tool would be … the standard of benchmarking on mobile devices where you can pick hardware decoders, software decoders—any decoders, really.” Running tests in an automated way, Tmar notes, helps, for example, people who are working on the player, the phone manufacturers, and the chipset manufacturers “benchmark properly to a use case that’s most basically representative of VOD nowadays and UGC content. And as such, we will be able to see things like energy usage, battery usage, and all of these aspects.”
Join us in May 2025 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at the next Streaming Media Connect.
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