Rav1e 0.3 Is Releasing Soon For Faster Rust-Based AV1 Encoding

Rav1e v0.2 brought 40~70% speed improvements over its previous release for this Rustlang-based AV1 video encoder but the upcoming Rav1e 0.3 will be even faster.

Rav1e and dav1d open-source developer Luca Barbato shared some of the project's roadmap this past weekend in Brussels, Belgium at the annual FOSDEM conference. With the upcoming Rav1e 0.3 release that is releasing soon, there should be speed improvements at the higher speed/preset levels thanks to a multi-threaded deblocking filter, more SIMD code, more auto-vectorizable code, and less memory allocations. In addition, Rav1e 0.3 is bringing changes to its RDO biasing (though it will hurt the performance at higher quality levels), new API features, and WebAssembly support.

Meanwhile Rav1e 0.4 is already being talked about for release in March with more API improvements, better rate control, and expanding the rate control API.

It's great seeing the ongoing Rav1e improvements. While some big strides are being made in performance, Rav1e still has much work ahead before it can offer comparable AV1 video encoding to the likes of Intel's SVT-AV1 encoder.

Those wanting to learn more about the Rav1e efforts in early 2020 can see the WebM recording of Luca Barbato's FOSDEM 2020 talk and the PDF slide deck.