Rav1e 0.5 Beta Released For This Rust-Written AV1 Encoder

Audio/video encoders and decoders are one of the areas where usage of the Rust programming language has increasing interest for speed and safety. One of the most promising Rust-written encoders at the moment is Rav1e for AV1 video encoding and it's now working towards its v0.5 release.

Rav1e 0.4 shipped at the start of the year while Rav1e 0.5 should be out soon with the beta being issued today. Rav1e 0.5 has a variety of code improvements, performance optimizations, and other enhancements to this Rust AV1 encoder.

Rav1e continues to promote itself as the "fastest and safest AV1 encoder". It certainly has safety benefits from using Rust and the performance tends to be much better than the reference libaom AV1 encoder, but when it comes to performance we've generally found SVT-AV1 to be faster at this point in time.

Those wanting to try out the Rav1e 0.5 beta encoder can grab the new sources out on GitHub.

If curious about the Rav1e CPU encode performance there are the rav1e benchmarks on OpenBenchmarking.org across many CPUs. Currently the test profile is against v0.4 but I'll be updating it to v0.5 upon the stable release.