Intel Releases AV1 Video Codec for CPUs Designed for Ultra High Definition Resolutions

As a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, Intel has done much to promote the AV1 codec and make it more accessible to manufacturers/content providers and end users. Intel was the first to offer AV1 hardware decoding with its Xe-LP GPUs in 2020. This week, it released version 1.0 of its fast AV1 encoder and decoder of open source scalable video technology for CPUs.

SVT-AV1 works with all modern processors.

AV1 open source video codec is designed for ultra high definition resolutions, wide color gamut and high dynamic range enhancements. AOMedia said in 2018 that its AV1 video codec was 30% more efficient than existing codecs such as H.265/HEVC.

But the problem with highly efficient codecs is that they are extremely expensive in terms of hardware resources and often require hardware acceleration to work properly. Meanwhile, modern CPUs have many features and new instructions that can be applied to decode and encode, which is exactly what SVT-AV1 does.

SVT-AV1 is a scalable, standards-independent encoder/decoder library that can take advantage of the multi-core nature of modern CPUs and AVX2 instructions. SVT-AV1 also adds further optimizations to the AVX2 instructions for increased performance, image quality improvements, fast decoding at more preset levels, and S-frame support.

Intel’s SVT-AV1 libraries are supported on modern x86 machines (5th generation Intel Core “Broadwell” or higher) on MacO, Linux, and Windows systems. Intel and Netflix initially initiated the SVT-AV1 project to develop a production-quality AV1 encoder with performance levels applicable to a variety of situations, from video-on-demand to encoding/transcoding of live streams.

Fuente: Phoronix