Intel Releases SVT-AV1 v1.5 With More Tuning & Optimizations

Intel's open-source engineers maintaining the SVT-AV1 software package as a high performance, cross-platform AV1 video encoder have issued a sizable update.

The SVT-AV1 1.5 release continues tuning the various presets offered by this CPU-based encoder, there are various known performance improvements (up to ~30% in select cases), a new -1 preset level for the quality reference level, a rewrite of the GStreamer plug-in, code clean-ups, and more.

- Optimize the tradeoffs for M0-M13 speeding up M5-M1 by 15-30% and improving the BDR of M6-M13 by 1-3%
- Create a new preset MR (--preset -1) to be the quality reference
- Optimize the tradeoffs for M8-M13 in the low delay encoding mode for SC and non-SC modes
- Add dynamic minigop support for the random access configuration enabled by default in M9 and below
- Add support to allow users to specify lambda scaling factors through the commandline
- Rewrite the gstreamer plugin and updating it to be uptodate with the latest API changes
- Add skip frames feature allowing the user to start encoding after n frames in the file
- Add ability to specify a smaller startup minigop size for every gop to enable faster prefetching
- Fix segmentation support and re-enable it with --aq-mode 1 to allow work on the region of interest API
- Add padding bytes to the EbSvtAv1EncConfiguration configuration structure keep its size unchanged until v2.0

Downloads and more details on the SVT-AV1 v1.5 encoder update via the AOMedia GitLab. I'll be firing up some v1.5 benchmarks soon on different Intel/AMD CPUs.