Intel To Ring In 2022 With New, Faster AV1 Encoder Release

[piotrj3]

VMAF is not perfect, but its pretty good at taking PV into account, as it was literally trained on people watching video.

generally VMAF is quite fine to compare diffrent codecs, but no one uses VMAF in process of developing codec. Basicly psychovisual settings are quite limited, and most of changes you make are not on psychovisual plane, but on simple efficiency. So when codec presets are tuned (between speed and quality) those presets are made based on SSIM or PSNR values, this is why codecs by default calcuate them.

For comparison of presets, PSNR or SSIM is perfect. For comparison of diffrent codecs you might take into account VMAF, but SSIM/PSNR should still give you pretty good idea.

[iskra32]

The new 0.8.8 version is good, it fixed a nasty bug, causing it to leak memory during long encodes.
Although it can encode pretty fast, it does not do as good of a job quality wise as the AOM encoder does. I tested a range of settings and compared it with AOM. I found out that encoding a video to a certain size with SvtAV1 always has a lower perceptual quality than with AOM. (both visual as in VMAF score). If you want the quality to be as good as AOM, you end up with a larger file and an encoding time that is about the same as AOM.
However if you do not care about quality/size then SvtAV1 can be good for you with relatively fast encoding leading to relatively big files and/or lower quality.

Not sure if this has changed but aomenc was unusably slow when I tried using it. SVT-AV1 is solid, rav1e looks promising although last time I tried it it lost tons of quality on repaint frames.

[FPScholten]

Not sure if this has changed but aomenc was unusably slow when I tried using it. SVT-AV1 is solid, rav1e looks promising although last time I tried it it lost tons of quality on repaint frames.

aomenc's default settings are for best quality, this is like the placebo setting in X265 or preset 1 in SVT_AV1 and tiling is not set so it wil use only 1 tile (the entire frame) with only 1 thread because threading is not enabled by default. I am using libaom-av1 with ffmpeg (both of which I compile myself) with these options:

-cpu-used 4 -row-mt true -threads 8 -crf 35 -tiles 4x2 -aq-mode 3

-cpu-used 4 : similar to presets in SVT_AV1 higher numbers are faster but increase filesize. 8 is fastest, anything between 3 and 6 will do depending on your systems computing power

-row-mt true : this enables tiling and multithreading

-threads 8 : specifies the number of threads to use in tiling mode I have 4 cores with hyperthreading = 8 threads

-crf 35 : single pass encoding ratefactor, 0 for lossless, higher numbers lower quality. (two pass and three pass are not really worth the hassle)

-tiles 4x2 : sets tiling to 4 rows and 2 columns, significant speedup in encoding for a very small quality loss. Do not use more tiles than available threads

aq-mode 3 : best quality setting for regular video, for other stuff like cartoons or images try 1 or 2 as well.

Experiment with these settings to find optimal quality/filesize/encodingtime for your system