Intel To Work On AV1 Decoding Support, FFmpeg / GStreamer Plugins

Yesterday Intel finally announced their SVT-AV1 video encoder as a promising high-performance AV1 encoder but it turns out they also have open-source plans this year for developing a performant AV1 decoder, among other interesting items on their road-map.

This morning I was pointed out to their public Trello instances for the Scalable Video Technology work.

On their SVT-AV1 agenda via the Public Trello are plans this quarter for YUV422/YUV444 support, multi-reference pictures, ALTREF pictures, adaptive transform block sizes, and other items. Of interest on their SVT-AV1 road-map is also plans for an AV1 decoder.

The to-be-developed AV1 decoder would live within SVT-AV1, decode all valid AV1 bitstreams, bit-identical output to the libaom decoder, etc. This is great news since GPU-based AV1 decoding isn't expected for at least another year or two and the CPU-based AV1 decoders to date haven't been exactly performant.

Meanwhile the SVT-HEVC Trello for this H.265 encoder includes more AVX bits, upstreaming their FFmpeg plug-in, developing a GStreamer plug-in, and implementing other functionality.

The SVT-VP9 board is less detailed at this point but there are plans as well for an FFmpeg plug-in and other features.

Interesting times ahead.