I asked Google to comment on MulticoreWare’s comment and haven’t yet heard back. So, we actually used mid-range settings for our encodes, not the full quality settings. As you’ll see in our encoding script below, for the first pass, we set this at the lowest quality (+8) and returned it to the mid-range (0) for the second pass. Rather, with the AOM encoder, you set the encoding speed/quality tradeoff using the -cpu-used switch, which can range from -8 to +8, with lower values delivering higher quality ( ). This didn’t accurately describe my AV1 encoding parameters.

In my experience, a reference encoder encodes with all parameters set for maximum quality, showing off the full quality available for the technology without concern for encoding speed. In the latter case, it will be a real comparison between HEVC and AV1/VP9.” The question is why comparing between x265 vs. After providing input, a representative from MulticoreWare added, “I believe it is not going to be a fair comparison between one commercial encoder and other reference encoders irrespective of any quality metric (PSNR/SSIM/VMAF). All input is included in the encoding parameters shown below. Given the extra time, I solicited input from Google for the AV1 and VP9 encodes and MulticoreWare, the developer of x265, for the x265 encodings. Some deficiencies in my test clips and procedures led to a second round with two 30-second clips. Once I learned that my editor was embarking on a vacation, I decided to increase that to four 30-second clips. I originally thought to test with four 5-second clips. After running some competitive encodes on a single 5-second clip for the book, I proposed an expanded test for Streaming Media. Since I was updating my book, Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less, for FFmpeg version 4.0, I decided to dig into the AV1 encoding parameters. For the first time, you had a single encoder that could produce all relevant codecs: H.264 with the x264 codec, HEVC with the x265 codec, VP9 using the Google Libvpx-vp9 codec, and AV1 using the LibAOM codec. The launch of FFmpeg 4.0 gave many compressionists their first chance to test the new AV1 codec, which is included in experimental form.

Av1 ffmpeg