Libaom, SVT-AV1 Mark New Open-Source AV1 Encoder Releases This Week

This week happened to see new releases of two prominent open-source AV1 video encoders.

Libaom 3.1 was released to start the week as the successor to libaom 3.0 from earlier in the year. The commit mentions a number of improvements for AVIF image encode improvements with this release. Though in early benchmarking of libaom 3.1 we are seeing some nice gains over the prior release:

Meanwhile ending out the week is SVT-AV1 0.8.7. SVT-AV1 is the high performance AV1 encoder originally developed by Intel but since then the development has shifted to the Alliance for Open Media members. While it's another point release in the v0.8 series, it is coming with many improvements. SVT-AV1 0.8.7 has more AVX2 and AVX-512 optimizations, various feature optimizations, tuning of the presets, HDR support, memory optimizations, and a variety of other enhancements.

See many benchmarks coming in of these new AV1 video encoder releases via the AOM-AV1 test profile page and SVT-AV1 test page. Sliding under our radar last month was also a new release of Google's libgav1 video encoder with the libgav1 0.16.3 release having brought more performance optimizations and other work.