Rav1e 0.3.1 Is 25~40% Faster At Low Speed Levels For Rust-Based AV1 Encoding

It was not even two full weeks ago that Rav1e 0.3 was released with speed optimizations and other AV1 encoding enhancements while released on Tuesday was Rav1e 0.3.1 with a change to boost encode speeds at lower levels.

The principal change with Rav1e 0.3.1 for this Rust-written AV1 video encoder is 25~40% better performance at lower speed levels (two through five). This big speed-up is by disabling fine directional prediction and intra-block transform splitting within inter-frames. The consequence of disabling these features for the double digit percentage speed improvements is approximately 1~2% lower video quality at these levels, which the developers deemed to be an acceptable trade for the faster encode times.

Even with the speed boost in Rav1e 0.3.1, this AV1 encoder is still much slower than the likes of Intel's SVT-AV1 Scalable Video Technology encoder.

Rav1e 0.3.1 with sources and Windows binaries are available from GitHub.

Rav1e 0.4 meanwhile is expected next month with more improvements on tap.