The VideoLAN and FFmpeg communities have published the release of the dav1d 1.0.0 library with the implementation of an alternative free decoder for the AV1 video encoding format. The project code is written in C (C99) with assembly inserts (NASM/GAS) and is distributed under the BSD license. Support for x86, x86_64, ARMv7 and ARMv8 architectures, and operating systems FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS has been implemented.
The dav1d library supports all the features of AV1, including advanced types of subsampling and all color depth control parameters stated in the specification (8, 10 and 12 bits). The library has been tested on a large collection of files in AV1 format. The key feature of dav1d is its focus on achieving the highest possible decoding performance and ensuring high-quality work in multi-threaded mode.
In the new version:
- The organization of multithreading has been redesigned, including automatic thread control.
- Added the ability to accelerate calculations using AVX-512 vector instructions. Improved previously added optimizations based on SSE2 and AVX2 instructions.
- A new API has been proposed to make it easier to use GPUs for acceleration.
- Added an API to obtain information about frames that have problems with decoding.
Let us remind you that the AV1 video codec was developed by the Open Media Alliance (AOMedia), which represents companies such as Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Intel, ARM, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, Amazon, Netflix, AMD, VideoLAN, Apple, CCN and Realtek. AV1 is positioned as a publicly available, royalty-free free video encoding format that is noticeably ahead of H.264, H.265 (HEVC) and VP9 in terms of compression levels. Across the range of resolutions tested, on average AV1 delivers the same level of quality while reducing bitrates by 13% compared to VP9 and 17% lower than HEVC. At high bitrates, the gain increases to 22-27% for VP9 and to 30-43% for HEVC. In Facebook tests, AV1 outperformed main profile H.264 (x264) by 50.3%, high profile H.264 by 46.2%, and VP9 (libvpx-vp9) by 34%.
Source: opennet.ru