RAV1E: The "Fastest & Safest" AV1 Encoder

Following the news about VP9 and AV1 having more room to improve particularly for alternative architectures like POWER and ARM, a Phoronix reader pointed out an effort that Mozilla is behind on developing the "rav1e" encoder.

AV1 up to this point for encoding on CPUs has been - unfortunately - extremely slow. But it turns out Mozilla and others are working on RAV1E as what they are billing as the fastest and safest AV1 encoder. RAV1E has been in development for a while now but has seemingly flown under our radar.

This is an experimental AV1 video encoder written in the Rust programming language that aims to support all use-cases eventually but for now is focused on areas where the libaom reference encoder is slow.

At this stage this "fast" encoder can provide for AV1 encoding of 480p video content at around five frames per second... Slow, but not as bad as the reference encoder.

Those wishing to learn more about RAV1E, it's hosted under the Xiph project on GitHub.