DAV1D v0.2 AV1 Video Decoder Released With SSSE3 & NEON Optimizations

The DAV1D open-source AV1 video decoder is now much more capable on older PCs and ARM mobile devices with its second release.

DAV1D 0.2.0 was released today, three months after the original dav1d 0.1 release. While the initial release offered up hand-written AVX2 code for running faster than the reference decoder on modern Intel/AMD CPUs, this release has focused on helping out older desktop CPUs as well as mobile devices.

DAV1D 0.2.0 features SSSE3 support for processors not supporting AVX2. Additionally, there is NEON SIMD support now for ARM hardware.

The SSSE3 support has really boosted the performance potential for older desktop CPUs and the NEON support is beginning to put the ARM performance on the right track. Details on this new DAV1D CPU-based AV1 video decoder release can be found via this blog post by Ewout ter Hoeven.

Too bad the release just missed my 27-way AV1/VP9/HEVC benchmark comparison, but will do another release when SVT and others have advanced as well to provide for another interesting benchmark comparison.

The code to DAV1D can be found via VideoLAN's Gitlab. VLC is working on updating to this DAV1D v0.2 release as is Firefox also working on integrating the improved AV1 decode support.