Intel Publishes Open-Source AV1 Video Encoder "SVT-AV1"

Yet another open-source project out of Intel is SVT-AV1, which is a new AV1 video encoder implementation for Windows and Linux Systems.

SVT-AV1 is short for the Scalable Video Technology AV1 encoder. Intel is aiming to make this encoder fast enough for video on-demand and live encoding/transcoding applications. Hearing their CPU-based performance plans for SVT-AV1 is certainly exciting and much welcomed, since there isn't any speedy AV1 encoder at this stage nor any really dominant player among the open-source options... On the decoding front, dav1d is doing very well and hopefully SVT-AV1 will take over on the encoding front at least until GPUs begin supporting native AV1 accelerated encoding.

SVT-AV1 is designed for Linux, Windows, and also macOS systems. This encoder is designed for running on Intel Xeon Skylake class hardware and newer. The memory requirements are a bit high with needing at least 48GB of RAM for 4K 10-bit streams with multi-threading on a 112 logical core system. Should you be going for 1080p AV1 content, only 16GB of RAM should be needed. SVT-AV1 is primarily designed for server use-cases rather than desktop encoding, but if your system is beefy enough, it should work out.

Those wanting to learn more about the SVT-AV1 encoder can do so via GitHub. I'll also look at adding this as a test profile for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org benchmarking (Update: test profile).

The same folks at Intel are also responsible for SVT-HEVC as a similar H.265/HEVC video encoder.