Intel Publishes Open-Source AV1 Video Encoder "SVT-AV1"

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 3 February 2019 at 07:53 AM EST. 17 Comments
INTEL
Yet another open-source project out of Intel is SVT-AV1, which is a new AV1 video encoder implementation for Windows and Linux Systems.

SVT-AV1 is short for the Scalable Video Technology AV1 encoder. Intel is aiming to make this encoder fast enough for video on-demand and live encoding/transcoding applications. Hearing their CPU-based performance plans for SVT-AV1 is certainly exciting and much welcomed, since there isn't any speedy AV1 encoder at this stage nor any really dominant player among the open-source options... On the decoding front, dav1d is doing very well and hopefully SVT-AV1 will take over on the encoding front at least until GPUs begin supporting native AV1 accelerated encoding.

SVT-AV1 is designed for Linux, Windows, and also macOS systems. This encoder is designed for running on Intel Xeon Skylake class hardware and newer. The memory requirements are a bit high with needing at least 48GB of RAM for 4K 10-bit streams with multi-threading on a 112 logical core system. Should you be going for 1080p AV1 content, only 16GB of RAM should be needed. SVT-AV1 is primarily designed for server use-cases rather than desktop encoding, but if your system is beefy enough, it should work out.

Those wanting to learn more about the SVT-AV1 encoder can do so via GitHub. I'll also look at adding this as a test profile for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org benchmarking (Update: test profile).

The same folks at Intel are also responsible for SVT-HEVC as a similar H.265/HEVC video encoder.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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