[2.1.0] - 2024-05-17

API updates

• One config parameter added within the padding size. Config param structure size remains unchanged
• Presets 6 and 12 are now pointing to presets 7 and 13 respectively due to the lack of spacing between the presets
• Further preset shuffling is being discussed in #2152

Encoder

• Added variance boost support to improve visual quality for the tune vq mode
• Improve the tradeoffs for the random access mode across presets:
• Speedup of 12-40% presets M0, M3, M5 and M6 while maintaining similar quality levels
• Improved the compression efficiency of presets M11-M13 by 1-2% (!2213)
• Added ARM optimizations for functions with c_only equivalent

Cleanup Build and bug fixes and documentation

• Use nasm as a default assembler and yasm as a fallback
• Fix performance regression for systems with multiple processor groups
• Enable building SvtAv1ApiTests and SvtAv1E2ETests for arm
• Added variance boost documentation
• Added a mailmap file to map duplicate git generated emails to the appropriate author

[2.0.0] - 2024-03-13

Major API updates

• Changed the API signaling the End Of Stream (EOS) with the last frame vs with an empty frame
• OPT\_LD\_LATENCY2 making the change above is kept in the code to help devs with integration
• The support of this API change has been merged to ffmpeg with a 2.0 version check
• Removed the 3-pass VBR mode which changed the calling mechanism of multi-pass VBR
• Moved to a new versioning scheme where the project major version will be updated every time API/ABI is changed

Encoder

• Improve the tradeoffs for the random access mode across presets:
• Speedup presets MR by \~100% and improved quality along with tradeoff improvements across the higher quality presets (!2179,\#2158)
• Improved the compression efficiency of presets M9-M13 by 1-4% (!2179)
• Simplified VBR multi-pass to use 2 passes to allow integration with ffmpeg
• Continued adding ARM optimizations for functions with c\_only equivalent
• Replaced the 3-pass VBR with a 2-pass VBR to ease the multi-pass integration with ffmpeg
• Memory savings of 20-35% for LP 8 mode in preset M6 and below and 1-5% in other modes / presets

Cleanup and bug fixes and documentation

• Various cleanups and functional bug fixes
• Update the documentation to reflect the rate control changes

https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu

ICYMI, Yuzu settled with Nintendo for $2.4M and tl;dr said that Yuzu's primary purpose was to aid and abet piracy. Nintendo won outright.

https://twitter.com/OatmealDome/status/1764715696250843321

>"I tend to spread positive energy," Hassouna says. "But when the war started, there was no positive energy." > >His darkest hour came on Feb. 12. > >The Israeli military unleashed heavy bombings to provide cover for commandos during a successful hostage rescue mission. At least 74 Palestinians were killed in that bombing campaign, according to Gaza health officials. > >Hassouna's mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and young nieces and nephew were among them. They were killed as they slept in the home where they were sheltering. It was the one night Hassouna happened to sleep over at a friend's house. > >"Now I am by myself," he says. "Why should I live my life without a family?"

And an extra article giving more background and lead up https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-general-runs-out-of-road-kyiv-washington/

Does anyone know how to determine the level of grain synth used in an encoded video? I have .webms that I've encoded with ffmpeg and svt-av1 but I don't have that grain synth information anymore.

In fact it would be nice if I could just see any other information about an encoded video (rate factor, preset used, etc). These details don't appear when using mediainfo so I presume they are lost and unknowable. But grain synth occurs at decode time, so that should still be something I can figure out, right?

Archive link. https://archive.is/N4Rqj

Some personal editorializing: This is a pretty remarkable first because of how captive we Americans are to pharma prices. Famously, when Medicare Part D was brought into existence by law it restricted the federal government from negotiating Part D drug prices. To me, shopping for drugs in Canada is tackling the symptom and ignores the cause. I wonder if this gets more traction with more states how it might affect drug prices in Canada, too.

The real solution to all this, of course, would be nationalize the healthcare industry in all aspects and to create a single payer healthcare system.

Huge improvements for AV1 users over the last stable HandBrake release.

The way they talk about it makes it sound like they invented the written word, but that notwithstanding the fonts actually look really nice in my opinion.

I think with the weight of Apple finally behind AV1 it is as blessed of a format as anything can be. Sisvel be damned.

> And, a new media engine now includes support for AV1 decode, providing more efficient and high-quality video experiences from streaming services.

I do not see AV1 encode support on this chip's announcement, however.

There are a lot of good improvements and fixes in this release. As a remorseful Nvidia on Linux user, I am extremely excited that GAMMA_LUT is finally making its debut in the Nvidia driver. This means I can actually try to use Gnome Wayland at night with the night shift feature, assuming other Wayland issues are also resolved.

It is licensed under GPLv2

Say I define different contexts or workspaces. So in my address bar I can type work and it will open up 5 pages that will be associated to that keyword. Then I can type bored and it will open up my 4 defined pages associated to that keyword.

I am NOT asking about pinning pages to the start/home page, and I am NOT asking about loading websites when Firefox starts up (because I don't want to always load the same things every time I launch ffox). I am also not asking about pinning tabs.

Some context about this here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/openai-details-how-to-keep-chatgpt-from-gobbling-up-website-data/

the robots.txt would be updated with this entry

User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /

Obviously this is meaningless against non-openai scrapers or anyone who just doesn't give a shit.

tl;dr question: How do I get the Handbrake Flatpak to operate at a high niceless level in its own cgroup by default? I'm using Fedora Linux. --- So if I understand things correctly, niceness in Linux affects how willing the process scheduler is to preempt a process. However, with cgroups, niceness only affects this scheduling relative to other processes within a cgroup. This means a process running with a high niceness in its own cgroup has the same priority as other processes in equivalent cgroups, and it will not in fact be preempted in a way one would expect.

So why does this matter to me at all? I have a copy of Handbrake installed from Flatpak. And sometimes I want to encode a video in the background while still having a decently responsive desktop experience so I can do other things, and basically let Handbrake occupy the cpu cycles I'm not using. Handbrake and the video encoding process should be at the bottom priority of everything to the maximum extent possible.

But it does not appear to be enough to just go into htop and set the handbrake process's niceness level to 19 and then start an encode, because of the cgroup business I mentioned above.

Furthermore, in my opinion Handbrake should always be the lowest priority process without my having to intervene. I would like to be able to launch it without having to set its niceness. Does anybody have suggestions on this? Is my understanding of the overall picture even correct?

I have been encoding some videos in AV1 lately and I thought I'd share my technique for those who may wish to do some AV1 on their own without having a messy setup. I think this is a pretty clean way, ultimately, to use Av1an's Docker image.

A forewarning: AV1 can be pretty to slow encode with. I've been doing it with DVDs where the 640x480 resolution of the video means a frame can be processed relatively quickly, but videos in 1920x1080 or 4k resolutions might be pretty intense where the encode speed only ends up being a frame a second.

Forewarning pt. 2: Something I learned that I CANNOT rely on is trying a faster encode speed to guesstimate the resulting file size and picture quality and then really maximize my results by lowering the encode speed. My observation has been that a slower encode speed will in fact improve the picture quality (and file size), such that I cannot be sure what something will look like without just encoding a very short sample at a slow speed. OK. Let's begin.

Operating System & Environment

I am using Fedora Linux 38. I'd like to use the Av1an package but that only has an official Arch release. I definitely don't want to spend time compiling this myself, so I will use the official Docker image instead. And I won't use Docker, actually, but Podman. I also use the Fish Shell. Its syntax is very slightly different from Bash's.

Now, Fedora users may know about SELinux. And something that kept happening to me was the security context of some of the files I'm shuffling around my hard drives would end up being not correct, making Podman incapable of seeing the files I'm trying to use. So instead of fixing the context per file (annoying) I just temporarily disabled SELinux.

sudo setenforce Permissive

Container image

From here things are pretty straightforward. I'll pull the docker image, which has a full Av1an setup ready to go.

podman pull docker.io/masterofzen/av1an:master

One little note is that you should use the master tag. A confusing thing about this image is that the latest tag is the old python version, and we want the current Rust version.

Executing Av1an

Now, navigate to whatever directory your source video is in. In my case, I losslessly encoded the DVDs with Handbrake into h264 and passed through the audio/chapter markers, etc. This gave me a good source to work with, even though it was a little bloated in file size. I don't think Av1an accepts MPEG-2, which is why I did that.

First I'll explain what the Podman command is doing for those who aren't familiar with Docker/Podman, and then I'll give a full working example.

podman run -v "$(pwd)":/videos:z --userns=keep-id -it --rm docker.io/masterofzen/av1an:master -i sourcevideo.mp4 -s scenes.csv --pix-format yuv420p10le -o output.webm -v "--VIDEO_OPTIONS" --keep -a "--AUDIO_OPTIONS"

• podman run - Execute a container
• -v "$(pwd)":/videos:z - Mount the present working directory as /videos in the container, and the :z is an SELinux labeling thing that can be dropped for non-SELinux users.
• --userns=keep-id - This flag helps keep the user id and group ids consistent between the host and container so that they don't get mangled. Your output file will belong to your user.
• -it - Execute the command in a visible shell session
• --rm - Remove the container (not the image, the container) when the command is done executing.

Final example

The rest of the flags are for Av1an itself, or for the encoders. So here's a full working example of how I used it, to encode with aomenc and Opus for the audio. Av1an uses aomenc by default.

podman run -v "$(pwd)":/videos:z --userns=keep-id -it --rm docker.io/masterofzen/av1an:master -i sourcevideo.mp4 -s scenes.csv --pix-format yuv420p10le -o output.webm -v " --cpu-used=3 --enable-qm=1 --threads=4 -b 10 --end-usage=q --cq-level=28 --lag-in-frames=48 --auto-alt-ref=1 --enable-fwd-kf=1" --keep -a "-c:a libopus -b:a 128k"

I think for an explanation for what individual flags do, and perhaps some guidance on how to use them effectively, I can only refer one to the guide written by Reddit user BlueSwordM https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/t59j32/encoder_tuning_part_4_a_2nd_generation_guide_to/