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

[phoronix]

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

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30821

[sdack]

New preset levels and changes in performance of existing levels could possibly be an indication in changes of compression ratios. Were there any or are the outputs still identical for each of the presets?

[brucethemoose]

I believe this has been asked before, but VMAF numbers would be good to show alongside the speed. Maybe as a separate bar right below each time bar.

[Quackdoc]

now if only discord supported avif and av1 so we can post things that actually look tolerable instead of paying for nitro. but then again, that would eat into their sales a little too much

[willmore]

New preset levels and changes in performance of existing levels could possibly be an indication in changes of compression ratios. Were there any or are the outputs still identical for each of the presets?

Michael may have chosen not to look into that as length (ratio) is most meaningful when the video quality is determined as well--and that's a very hard thing to do programatically.

[piotrj3]

Michael may have chosen not to look into that as length (ratio) is most meaningful when the video quality is determined as well--and that's a very hard thing to do programatically.

that is not hard to do. Most codecs itself support calculating PSNR/SSIM values. SVT-AV1 supports it, X265 supports it, x264 supports it, vpxenc supports it.

In SVT-AV1 you need to add simple --enable-stat-report 1 and it will calculate PSNR/SSIM. Keep in mind those are values that become worse with good psycho-visual tuning, like good deblocking filters make content look better to user, but makes those values worse.

[willmore]

that is not hard to do. Most codecs itself support calculating PSNR/SSIM values. SVT-AV1 supports it, X265 supports it, x264 supports it, vpxenc supports it.

In SVT-AV1 you need to add simple --enable-stat-report 1 and it will calculate PSNR/SSIM. Keep in mind those are values that become worse with good psycho-visual tuning, like good deblocking filters make content look better to user, but makes those values worse.

Yes, that's what I mean, you can use the built in stats, but they don't really mean anything as far as human perceived quality goes. There's not much value to them given that psycho-visual tuning is what makes a good high quality encoder really good. And the OP was asking about the low setting which are the high quality ones where one would expect PV optimizations to be most important.

[Quackdoc]

I never cared about the stats myself, ill just encode a short video that has relevant footage, if it is unacceptable, re-encode it. rinse and repeat until I find an acceptable level, and use that as a preset.

[brucethemoose]

Yes, that's what I mean, you can use the built in stats, but they don't really mean anything as far as human perceived quality goes. There's not much value to them given that psycho-visual tuning is what makes a good high quality encoder really good. And the OP was asking about the low setting which are the high quality ones where one would expect PV optimizations to be most important.

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

[FPScholten]

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.