AVIF in Spectrum lib

While browsing for AV1/AVIF updates, I noticed this commit to Facebook’s open source Spectrum library that adds support for AVIF format.

• https://github.com/facebookincubator/spectrum/commit/89b87bee831d3c7aabd0ad327fb118ce699df55d

Spectrum is an image transcoding library for iOS and Android that is meant to be integrated into apps for image operations. Hopefully this means that we’ll see apps supporting AVIF format soon!

FFmpeg 4.2 release

FFmpeg 4.2 codenamed “Ada” was released on August 5th, 2019. It brought with it support for AV1 decoding through libdav1d decoder. This should make it possible for applications which integrate FFmpeg to build in support for decoding AV1 files. For the full release notes visit the below link.

• https://ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr4.2

dav1d 0.4.0

In July, dav1d got it’s 4th major release codenamed “Cheetah”. Here are the changes included in this release

• 25% speedup on ARM64
• Minor improvements on SSE and ARM
• Major improvements to RAM usage (halving the RAM used in some cases!)

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/-/tags/0.4.0

libaom updates

libaom seems to be coming along nicely with some fairly substantial improvements this month!

• ~37% reduction in memory for multi-thread and ~18% reduction in memory use for single-thread for encoding 1080p video using 4x2 tiles and 8 threads (credit to u/AutoAltRef6 for noticing)

• 4% reduction in memory usage for 4K+ videos (credit to u/AutoAltRef6 for noticing)

• ~5% and ~3.5% encode time reduction for cpu-used 3 and 4 (credit to u/AutoAltRef6 for noticing)

• Another ~10% speed improvement for cpu-used 3 and 4 (credit to u/DominicHillsun for noticing)

• ~57% memory reduction when encoding 4k videos over 33 frames (credit to u/DominicHillsun for noticing)

Convolutional Neural Networks Based Texture Modeling For AV1

The following research paper released in August discusses how using a different coding method for “perceptually insignificant” regions in the frame can lead to substantial data rate reductions while maintaining visual quality. Some of this research was presented by Dr. Zoe Liu in her “Aurora AV1 encoder” presentation at Big Apple Video conference 2019 back in June. I suspect these neural network based techniques are what allow the Aurora encoder to show so much promise at this early stage. The paper can be found at the link below.

• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.02875.pdf

Online AV1 converter

You an encoding format has gone mainstream when websites start popping online allowing you to upload any video and convert it to the format in question :). I found one such website last month. Enjoy!

https://convertio.co/av1-converter/

Previous ecosystem updates

• AV1 Ecosystem Update July 2019
• AV1 Ecosystem Update June 2019
• AV1 Ecosystem Update May 2019
• AV1 Ecosystem Update April 2019

AV1 resources

• AV1 Resource Central: Videos, Tools, Presentations, Comparisons, Research Papers, Encoders, Decoders
• It’s time to replace GIFs with AV1 video!
• Building a scalable ‘shot-based’ serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure

Reach out if you have any questions! Feel free to follow me on

• Twitter - @singhkays
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/singhkays/