SVT-AV1 1.4 & Rav1e 0.6 Released For Open-Source AV1 Encoding

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SVT-AV1 1.4 & Rav1e 0.6 Released For Open-Source AV1 Encoding

Yesterday marked new releases of the SVT-AV1 and Rav1e open-source AV1 video encoders...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-1.4-Rav1e-0.6

[sobrus]

I wonder if video quality is better too. I've tried previous versions with ffmpeg and was not impressed to say the least. While it may be superior at very low/streaming bitrates to maintain watchable quality over the internet, when it comes to high fidelity high bitrate video, both hevc and vp9 are much better. Even my RDNA2 hardware encoder preserved more fine details than any AV1 encoder at any settings lol.

[birdie]

I wonder if video quality is better too. I've tried previous versions with ffmpeg and was not impressed to say the least. While it may be superior at very low/streaming bitrates to maintain watchable quality over the internet, when it comes to high fidelity high bitrate video, both hevc and vp9 are much better. Even my RDNA2 hardware encoder preserved more fine details than any AV1 encoder at any settings lol.

VVC is quite a lot better than VP9/AV1 if you're primarily concerned about picture quality/bitrate vs patent purity.

[sobrus]

VVC is quite a lot better than VP9/AV1 if you're primarily concerned about picture quality/bitrate vs patent purity.

Yes, but it is also very slow and not supported by anything right now. While HEVC and VP9 can be played back on almost any device (like UHD TV). And they are sufficient to bring my 5950x to its knees it terms of encoding speed. I'm not going to have faster machine anytime soon.
(there is quite substantial quality increase when going to preset slow in x265 and cpu-used 0 in libvpx, so I'd rather avoid faster settings)

[Alliancemd]

I like Rust like the next memory management geek but "rav1e" having 77% of the code written in Assembly, at this point is a bit of a stretch to call it "Rust-written". It's Assembly with a little bit of Rust on the sides.

[birdie]

Yes, but it is also very slow and not supported by anything right now. While HEVC and VP9 can be played back on almost any device (like UHD TV). And they are sufficient to bring my 5950x to its knees it terms of encoding speed. I'm not going to have faster machine anytime soon.
(there is quite substantial quality increase when going to preset slow in x265 and cpu-used 0 in libvpx, so I'd rather avoid faster settings)

True so but I prefer to encode once and leave it be for the future. If you have plenty of storage you can keep the originals and reencode whenever your devices start to support something. And then, just like with every codec, VVC prefers raw video vs. re-encoding something.

VVC is definitely a codec for the future yet, as almost no TV sets or set-top boxes support it yet (sans for very rare models).

[guara]

I found that SVT-AV1 is “fast enough” to compete with x265 on the medium to slow presets. Unfortunately, it still lacks support for YUV 422.

[Quackdoc]

I wonder if video quality is better too. I've tried previous versions with ffmpeg and was not impressed to say the least. While it may be superior at very low/streaming bitrates to maintain watchable quality over the internet, when it comes to high fidelity high bitrate video, both hevc and vp9 are much better. Even my RDNA2 hardware encoder preserved more fine details than any AV1 encoder at any settings lol.

ffmpeg's defaults are... not great, right now svtav1 has a very low quality celing, with aomenc being in the middle and rav1e having the highest (well there is a fork of a fork of blueswords fork that makes aomenc that can compare if not beat rav1e) but notice that right now rav1e is the slowest of them all. there does seem to be a bit of renewed interest around rav1e though. but at this point svtav1's focus is entirely different, aomenc devs do whatever the hell they want, so I would hold hope for rav1e, just dont hold your breath too.

[sobrus]

ffmpeg's defaults are... not great, right now svtav1 has a very low quality celing, with aomenc being in the middle and rav1e having the highest (well there is a fork of a fork of blueswords fork that makes aomenc that can compare if not beat rav1e) but notice that right now rav1e is the slowest of them all. there does seem to be a bit of renewed interest around rav1e though. but at this point svtav1's focus is entirely different, aomenc devs do whatever the hell they want, so I would hold hope for rav1e, just dont hold your breath too.

Correct, but they are not great for vp9 as well - I've found adding "-tune-content 2 -aq-mode 2" helps a lot in my case without increasing bitrate noticeably (live footage from mirrorless camera).
And yes, rav1e has the best quality and is slowest (with aom and svt giving me almost the same results), but even this encoder maintains good quality only for I frames. P frames are falling apart. I've tried all the settings, tunings, even noise synthesis in SVT, but it only made it worse. And rav1e, at least previous version, doesn't have crf rate control, which puts it at a big efficiency disadvantage against any other codec.

One day AV1 may be great, but certainly not yet. I'm just kinda surprised that everyone raves (pun intended) about AV1 and that it is already a king of quality metrics like VMAF (maybe with UHD content at 1Mbit/s?). When in reality it's just ... meh.
And after 5 years of developement, previous formats already had a good quality optimized relatively fast encoders, so I'm not expecting miracles.

[Quackdoc]

Correct, but they are not great for vp9 as well - I've found adding "-tune-content 2 -aq-mode 2" helps a lot in my case without increasing bitrate noticeably (live footage from mirrorless camera).
And yes, rav1e has the best quality and is slowest (with aom and svt giving me almost the same results), but even this encoder maintains good quality only for I frames. P frames are falling apart. I've tried all the settings, tunings, even noise synthesis in SVT, but it only made it worse. And rav1e, at least previous version, doesn't have crf rate control, which puts it at a big efficiency disadvantage against any other codec.

One day AV1 may be great, but certainly not yet. I'm just kinda surprised that everyone raves (pun intended) about AV1 and that it is already a king of quality metrics like VMAF (maybe with UHD content at 1Mbit/s?). When in reality it's just ... meh.
And after 5 years of developement, previous formats already had a good quality optimized relatively fast encoders, so I'm not expecting miracles.

sure at the very top fidelity hevc and avc will win over av1, but I myself have already encoded pretty much my entire library of videos using av1. since unless you are aiming for peak quality, AV1 wins almost all the time for me, and with significant space savings over hevc or avc