The AV2 spec is out, and I've heard very little in terms of actual adoption. AFAIK there is no talk of AV2 support in any browsers yet, and no support in VLC. I think there is preliminary support in FFMPEG, but I'm not 100% on that.
How close are us nerdy early-adopters to being able to play an AV2 clip?
Hi, I have a few TV series here - mostly animated shows in 720p/1080p (H.264) - and I’d like to compress them to AV1. My main priority is maximizing storage savings while maintaining acceptable quality. Is SVT-AV1-HDR the encoder of choice for this, or should I look at SVT-AV1 instead? What settings should I try out? Thanks!
v2.0 is a major performance update. VMAF, VMAF NEG and VMAF v1 now run on
any GPU, the other metrics and Video Compare are several times faster, and the
app uses far less memory.
This will likely be the last major release of VideoMetricsLab. While it was a lot of fun to work on this, it has consumed far too much of my life in the past month and I need to back off on this a lot to have a healthier life. I will still do little things here and there, but releases will be much slower going forward.
VideoMetricsLab is a free Windows app for measuring and comparing video quality. Add a source and any number of encodes, and it calculates VMAF, VMAF v1, SSIMULACRA2, Butteraugli, ColorVideo VDP, PSNR, SSIM and XPSNR in one run, accelerated on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs. Per-frame graphs show exactly where each encode falls behind, and frame-exact playback switches instantly between the source and each encode, so you can see the differences the scores point to. It’s built for anyone tuning encoders, comparing codecs or settings, or checking a release before it ships.
Let me know what you think, have any issues, or have feature requests.
v2.0 changelog
Metric performance
VideoMetricsLab-cli, for running comparisons from scripts.Features:
Metrics
Fast on any GPU
Compare and inspect
Workflow
VideoMetricsLab-cli, for scripts.The app can be downloaded below.
One surprising result: On CPU with ffmpeg, decoding with VVC consumed on average 10x more energy than h264, h265, vp9 and av1 on the same videos / same machines!
To get there, I ran 4 months of video encoding/decoding tests on 7 different machines.
The result is a fully open dataset with 140k+ encode/decode runs with measurements for time, power (real wattmeter + RAPL), CPU/RAM usage, temperature, bitrate, metrics and ffprobe.
Setup:
The data was collected with mendevi.
Here is an example of how to use the dataset to visualise the energy required to decode a video stream on a CPU, depending on the codec.
https://reddit.com/link/1wz5lu3/video/t8etai3b8vth1/player
Here is another example comparing the bitrate and distortion performance of AV1 versus H.264, regardless of the duration.
Which analysis would you like to see?
If you’d like to explore the dataset yourself, a lightweight JSON version is available here, while the full 50 GB SQLite dataset can be downloaded via torrent here.
For those curious how far compiling ffmpeg+libsvtav1 from source can get you versus prebuilt binaries, here is a quick comparison on macos-arm64 and ubuntu-x86_64.
macos-arm64:
| Command | Mean [s] | Min [s] | Max [s] | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
O3-LTO-PGO |
30.783 ± 0.058 | 30.690 | 30.844 | 1.00 |
O3-LTO |
32.145 ± 0.077 | 32.048 | 32.248 | 1.04 ± 0.00 |
O3 |
32.534 ± 0.105 | 32.425 | 32.686 | 1.06 ± 0.00 |
O2 |
32.626 ± 0.260 | 32.201 | 32.899 | 1.06 ± 0.01 |
homebrew ffmpeg |
36.248 ± 0.080 | 36.129 | 36.321 | 1.18 ± 0.00 |
osxexperts |
217.345 ± 0.255 | 217.060 | 217.653 | 7.06 ± 0.02 |
ubuntu-x86_64:
| Command | Mean [s] | Min [s] | Max [s] | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
O3-LTO-PGO |
38.256 ± 0.065 | 38.188 | 38.346 | 1.00 |
O3-LTO |
39.104 ± 0.175 | 38.907 | 39.287 | 1.02 ± 0.00 |
O2 |
40.140 ± 0.529 | 39.832 | 41.075 | 1.05 ± 0.01 |
O3 |
40.327 ± 0.352 | 39.972 | 40.853 | 1.05 ± 0.01 |
BtbN |
41.768 ± 0.282 | 41.441 | 42.043 | 1.09 ± 0.01 |
ubuntu ffmpeg |
100.847 ± 0.279 | 100.544 | 101.130 | 2.64 ± 0.01 |
results were recorded with hyperfine using preset 3, crf 25, libsvtav1.
TLDR: optimizations (O3+LTO+PGO) can shave off about 10-15% depending on the platform.
I am thinking about trading in my 14" base m4 macbook pro (16+512) for a mac mini m6 32 gb. I have a NAS , with the current insane price of Hdds , I am thinking about getting something more powerful to transcode and compress videos and pictures in order to save space.
I am mainly using Handbrake to transcode my videos(movies and anime) to AV1 codec, most of them are hevc 1080p. I am only going to do software transcode for better quality so the lack of hardware encoding doesn't bother me , whats matter is cpu multi core performance for this task . As for pictures I plan to convert them to Webp format. Given the m6 is quite an improvement in multi core performance over the base m5 and m4 , do you think it can give me much better performance in these tasks?
Even though I prefer Macs , what are the other options besides Macs that are not to expensive and is power efficient ?
Skill (free): https://github.com/evilmartians/agent-skills/blob/main/skills/skills-visibility/SKILL.md
Or npx skills add https://evilmartians.com/agent-skills --skill skills-visibility -a claude-code -g
I packaged our playbook for publishing a skill catalog into a skill. Point your agent at it and it builds the .well-known/agent-skills/index.json discovery index, packs the tarballs, and computes the digests, so npx skills, gh skill, and Claude's marketplace can all install from your domain.
The blog post explains why each piece works the way it does, including why you shouldn't point the index at Github: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/publishing-agent-skills-discovery-index
Disclosure: I work at Evil Martians and it's our blog.
Latest versions of SVT-AV1-HDR Encoder Lib v4.2.0-3-ga46bc2d59 "Ghost Robot" doesn't seem to be injecting the HDR metdata into the encoded file video stream. This used to work in SVT-AV1-HDR Encoder Lib v4.1.0 "Chromedome". I know I can add the metadata tags to mkv container, but I rather have it directly in the video stream like before.
VSPipe.exe -c y4m input.vpy - | SvtAv1EncApp.exe --input-depth 10 --input - --progress 2 --crf 36 --preset 2 --tune 6 --enable-dlf 2 --qp-scale-compress-strength 2 --film-grain 10 --ac-bias 1.0 --color-primaries 9 --transfer-characteristics 16 --matrix-coefficients 9 --mastering-display "G(0.2650,0.6900)B(0.1500,0.0600)R(0.6800,0.3200)WP(0.3127,0.3290)L(1000.0000,0.0050)" --content-light 1000,110 --output output.ivf
Has something changed? Am I doing something wrong?
***v1.4 is here with some huge new features like GPU accelerated VMAF! Enjoy.***
Here's an app I wrote to analyze video quality between different encodes. This was inspired by FFMetrics, but I wanted many more features for comparisons, like advanced statistics and an ability to easily and instantly subjectively A/B compare encoded videos with the source. This makes subjective video quality comparisons so much easier when you can compare on a frame by frame basis and while the video is playing, and instantly switch to the source or a different encoded video.
So I decided to write my own app, and I'd like to share it with all of you. I hope you all enjoy.
Let me know what you think, have any issues, or have feature requests.
v1.4 changelog
Features:
The app can be downloaded below.