The first tool, webm.py is written in Python and provides simple wrapper around ffmpeg with useful defaults. So I went ahead and implement support in my tools right away, even while it’s still a bleeding edge technology. The compression efficiency and planned hardware support of AV1 looks fantastic, it should be really beneficial to add to any modern converter. You can read about technologies used in AV1 in this paper, some test comparisions with competitive solutions are available here. It was made by a collaboration of large IT companies such as Google, Mozilla and Netflix called AOMedia and first stable release was made in March of this year. In case you still haven’t heard about it, AV1 is a royalty-free modern video coding format which aims to provide better quality than alternative, patent encumbered H.265 (HEVC). Both of them work on all three major platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux) and cover typical usecases of encoding videos on demand. The conversion time is certainly significant, but given the file weight gains, it overrides the issue of conversion time which for me is not important, as I let the conversion work in the background while I do other things on the computer and at night the conversion does not bother me, as my computer does not make noise even at high loads.I’m happy to announce that my two WebM converters, webm.py (command-line) and boram (graphical) now support encoding to the new AV1 video format, starting with versions 0.12.0 and 0.5.0 accordingly.

The options available by libsvtav1 in FFmpeg do not allow me to get the result I want, I have either small files, but of mediocre quality or good quality files, but of enormous weight.īy passing the video tracks to SvtAv1EncApp, I get the weight gains I mentioned earlier in this post and the quality of the video tracks is very good.

There is only in smaller format (512x280) where I have a loss of 5,5 % in file size compared to H265. In DVD format (720 × 576) I gain another 20% in file size compared to H265. In 720p I gain 30 to 45% in file size compared to H265. Even for resolutions lower than 1080p, there is one big advantage, and that is the file weight.

Ffmpeg av1 to h264