Leading tech companies and streaming services are behind the AV1 standard.
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AV1 compared to H.264 AVC.
AV1 Compared to H.264
Press the blue play button to see how you can stream 1080p with 75% fewer bits compared to H.264.
AV1 Playback Support. AV1 player and device support is expanding rapidly. Select a category to see the companies and platforms supporting AV1.
- All Platforms
- SoC & Silicon
- Mobile Devices
- CE Devices
- SW Decoders
- Apps & Platforms
Live AV1 Performance.
AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon & Aurora1 vs. SVT-AV1. Use Left and Right Arrows to see how Aurora1 compares to SVT-AV1 running on the AMD EPYC 7763 and Intel Xeon 8380 in 4Kp60 live.
Aurora1 vs. SVT-AV1 4Kp60 Live
AMD EPYC 7763 – 64 Cores / 128 Threads
Aurora1 operates 7.2x as fast, with 32% lower CPU usage, and 92% less memory consumption than SVT-AV1 at a similar quality level and bitrate.
Intel Xeon 8380 – 40 Cores / 80 Threads
Aurora1 operates 6.4x as fast while consuming 78% less memory than SVT-AV1 at a similar quality level and bitrate.
AMD EPYC 7763 vs. Intel Xeon 8380 4Kp60 Live
Aurora1 Advantage
96% faster on AMD EPYC 7763 than Intel Xeon 8380.
7.2x as fast as SVT-AV1 running on AMD EPYC 7763, and 6.4x faster on Intel Xeon 8380.
Four (4) concurrent 4Kp60 live streams may be encoded on a single AMD EPYC 7763 processor.
Get Eight 4Kp60 Live Streams on AMD EPYC.
The AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series SoC allows video platforms the ability to unleash all-new levels of speed and performance in the data center for video streaming platforms, social networks, WebRTC-based video conferencing apps, desktop as a service, OTT streaming services, cloud gaming platforms, and live linear video streaming services.
EPYC’s balanced set of resources enables you to match the CPU core count to your video encoding requirements without compromising processor features.
By running the Aurora1 AV1 Software Encoder on AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series processors using a single-socket system, video services can encode four (4) real-time channels in broadcast-quality 4Kp60. For applications requiring support for HLS or DASH, users may transcode two or three ABR profile ladders on a single machine using a dual-socket AMD EPYC™ 7003 processor-based system.
This incredible performance opens the highly desired AV1 video codec to be used in a wide range of premium SVOD, live sports, broadcast streaming, and WebRTC applications. See HTOP graphic below that clearly shows consistently high core utilization.
The AMD Advantage for AV1
With the power of EPYC 7003 processors that offer up to 64 cores and 128 threads and using the latest Zen 3 cores, AMD EPYC is perfectly suited for highly compute-intensive workloads like AV1 video encoding.
Designed with eight chiplets of eight cores each, all eight cores in the chiplet are connected, enabling an effective double L3 cache design for a lower overall cache latency structure. With 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0, eight channels of memory, and most EPYC 7003 models supporting dual-processor connectivity, it’s easy to see why the AMD EPYC 7003 series of processors are so well suited for video encoding using the new AV1 standard.
Aurora1 Fast Compared to x265 Medium.
- Aurora1 Fast compared with x265 Medium for high-quality live use cases.
- Video content from the AOM standard test set (object-1-fast, also a longer version for SIWG CTC) containing 30 videos of various resolutions – (16) 1080p, (7) 720p, and (7) 360p, mainly 60fps, with different qualities, various content types, and many varying visual characteristics.
- Both encoders were configured in VBR mode, running on an Intel Core i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz machine.
- Aurora1 Fast on average achieved a BD-rate gain of 38% in Overall PSNR, 37% in Average PSNR, 38% in SSIM, and 35.5% in VMAF.
- Aurora1 Fast operates a little slower at 88% of the speed of x265 Medium.
RTC AV1 Performance.
AV1, VP9, and H.264 Compared.
With Aurora1, AV1 can achieve a 50% coding efficiency gain over H.264 and HEVC across many content types and use cases. AV1 is ideal for use in RTC applications since the AV1 Screen Content Coding (SCC) tool is unique among all current codec standards.
Enabling SCC in Aurora1 reduces screen content bitrates to the 100-500kbps range, an achievement that is not possible with any other video codec standard.
With the announcement of AV1 integrated with WebRTC in Chrome 90, we compared Aurora1 to libaom-RT (the real-time mode of libaom) and OpenH264, using configurations aligned to the structures inside WebRTC.
WebRTC is a capability that is essential for real-time online streaming to browsers. libaom-RT is the open-source encoder behind RTC AV1 and it is the solution that powers Google DUO and Google Meet.
To learn more about AV1 WebRTC support, read: Chrome 90 Beta: AV1 Encoder for WebRTC, New Origin Trials, and More, and AV1 Encoder feature for Chrome. Read more about Aurora1’s performance in RTC applications.
AV1 Screen Content (SCC) Tools.
AV1 is optimized for real-time Screen Content Coding (SCC) making it ideal for the use-case of RTC (WebRTC) use cases and why it’s been deployed by large enterprise customers including Google for Duo and Cisco with Webex. Screen content represents a significant percentage of online Internet video content including remote desktop services, virtualized graphics, and video editing solutions, computer-generated graphics applications, and live game content streaming.
AV1 is the first video codec standard that includes Screen Content Coding (SCC) tools in its main body, meaning that every AV1 decoder to be compliant must support these SCC features. For screen content video, Aurora1 demonstrates superior coding efficiency advantages compared to other state-of-the-art codec standards. Using a single core of a standard PC, Aurora1 can achieve a BD-rate savings of more than 80% compared to that of x264, meaning that Aurora1 needs less than a quarter of the bitrate consumed by x264 to achieve the same visual quality.
H.264 and AV1 Screen Content Examples.
H.264 1080p - 800 Kbps x264
AV1 1080p - 400 Kbps Aurora1
Learn about AV1 Screen Content Coding Tools.
VOD AV1 Performance.
SVT-AV1 compared to Aurora1.
- Results shown reflect Aurora1 Slow compared to SVT-AV1 v0.8.7 Preset 3.
- Video set used was vimeo-corpus-10s containing 15 videos (each 10 seconds long) of various resolutions, mainly 1080p or 4K, differing frame rates, multiple quality levels, and content types including different visual characteristics.
- Both encoders were configured in CRF mode, running on an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core machine.
- Aurora1 on average achieved a BD-rate gain of 15% in Overall PSNR, 14.5% in Average PSNR, 14% in SSIM, and 15% in VMAF.
- Aurora1 runs 3.8x as fast as SVT-AV1.
AV1 Resource Links.
AV1 MSU Codec Study Results
Click to read: 2020 MSU Codec Study AV1 Results – Full HD
Click to read: 2019 MSU Codec Study AV1 Results – 4K & Full HD
Reference Software
- AOMedia provides an AV1 Reference Codebase and an AVIF Reference Codebase.
- Share encoding scenarios and encode parameters on the AOMedia Community wiki.
Software Decoders
- dav1d is an open-source AV1 decoder developed by the VideoLAN and FFmpeg communities and sponsored by the Alliance for Open Media.
- libgav1 is an open-source AV1 decoder that is Main profile (0) & High profile (1) compliant.
- SVT-AV1 is an open-source AV1 codec implementation which includes an encoder and decoder.
Software Encoders
- Visionular Aurora1 AV1 encoder from Visionular.
- Eve-AV1 is a proprietary AV1 encoder from Two Orioles.
- rav1e is an open-source AV1 encoder written in Rust and sponsored by Xiph.
- SVT-AV1 is an open-source AV1 codec implementation which includes an encoder and decoder.