Minimalist Guide to AV1 Video Encoding

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2024-05-05 17:00:05

AV1 is an open source, royalty-free video codec. It was released in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). This group includes firms such as ARM, Apple, Intel, Nvidia and Samsung.

Much of the 8K footage I've come across needs about 1 GB of storage for every minute of video. This is due to x264 encoding being used as it is one of the few codecs that enjoys widespread hardware support. x265 would be 2x better but it attracts royal fees and hasn't taken off in adoption among content producers.

To download an 8K video in real-time would require a solid 135 Mbps Internet connection. 8K might be a novelty for watching movies in your living room but it's more of a minimum requirement for Virtual Reality (VR).

Also, asking someone to save 60 GB on their phone for every hour of content they want to consume before a flight is asking a lot, even of the larger flagship smartphones.

There are four major open source software implementations of AV1. I'll briefly cover three of them (aom, dav1d, rav1e) before going more into depth with SVT-AV1.