rav1e 0.1.0 - Made in Tokyo

Intro

AV1 is a modern video codec brought to you by an alliance of many different bigger and smaller players in the multimedia field.
I'm part of the VideoLan organization and I spent quite a bit of time on this codec lately.

rav1e: The safest and fastest AV1 encoder, built by many volunteers and Mozilla/Xiph developers.
It is written in rust and strives to provide good speed, quality and stay maintainable.

Made in Tokyo

The first official release of rav1e happened during the Video Dev Days 2019 in Tokyo.
Since it was originally presented during Video Dev Days 2017 it felt the right thing to do.

What is inside

Since last time I blogged about it, there are few changes:

crav1e is no more

The C-API now is part of rav1e itself and everything is built by cargo-c.

cargo install cargo-c
cargo cinstall --destdir=/tmp/staging
sudo cp /tmp/staging/* /

Thats's all you need to use rav1e from C.

New API features

Keyframe placement

The rust API now let you override the keyframe placement

  let cfg = Config::default();
  let mut ctx: Context<u8> = cfg.new_context().unwrap();
  let f1 = ctx.new_frame();
  let f2 = f1.clone();
  let info = FrameParameters {
    frame_type_override: FrameTypeOverride::Key
};

  // Send the plain frame data
  ctx.send_frame(f1)?;
  // Send the data and the per-frame parameters
  // In this case the frame is forced to be a keyframe.
  ctx.send_frame((f2, info))?;
  // Flush the encoder, it is equivalent to a call to `flush()`
  ctx.send_frame(None)?;

Multipass rate control

It is possible to use Context::twopass_out() to feed back the rate control information that Context::twopass_in() can produce.

The API is intentionally opaque to the point you deal with pre-serialized data and not structured information.

Config validation

We added Config::validate() to make sure the settings are correct and return a detailed error (InvalidConfig) if that's not the case.

Speed

We overall made it a lot faster:

15:23 < koda> hey guys, did an encode with the new 0.1.0, 20 hours for 8 minutes, down from 32 hours using a two month old build
15:23 < koda> congrats (and thanks) for making these speed improvements

And we are still working to speed it up a lot. The current weekly snapshot is an additional 20-25% faster compared to 0.1.0.

NOTE: rav1e is still resources conscious, so it will not use all the threads and memory available. This makes it good if you want to encode multiple videos in parallel, but we will work on adding additional parallelism so even the single-video scenario is covered better.

What's next

Ideally a 0.2.0 will appear the early December, it will contain many speed improvements, lots of bugfixes (in particular docs.rs will serve the documentation) and possibly a large boost in single-pass quality if what Tim and Guillaume are working on will land in time.