Intel Releases SVT-AV1 1.0 For Speedy AV1 Video Encoding

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0.

Intel has rapidly advanced SVT-AV1 since we noticed the code in early 2019 and Intel then went on to formally announce it in April 2019. Over the past three years they have pushed countless performance optimizations and other improvements to this AV1 video encoder.

It was just back in January that SVT-AV1 0.9 released while this morning SVT-AV1 v1.0 was christened as their latest major milestone. More GPUs are beginning to appear with AV1 encode capabilities while SVT-AV1 1.0 is there for all the CPUs from mobile/desktop to servers for speedy AV1 CPU-based encoding.

With SVT-AV1 1.0 there is additional AVX2 optimizations for making this encoder even faster with modern CPUs. Additionally SVT-AV1 1.0 adds S-frames support, expanded use of fast-decode for more preset levels, visual quality improvements, various fixes, other preset tuning, updated documentation, and other improvements.

Overall SVT-AV1 1.0 is a rather nice release and nice to see these improvements over the past three years culminate with now hitting the 1.0 milestone.

SVT-AV1 1.0 is available from AOMedia's GitLab. I'll be running SVT-AV1 1.0 benchmarks shortly -- see current CPU comparison benchmarks of SVT-AV1 via OpenBenchmarking.org.