An Empirical Study of Reducing AV1 Decoder Complexity and Energy Consumption via Encoder Parameter Tuning

The widespread adoption of advanced video codecs such as AV1 is often hindered by their high decoding complexity, posing a challenge for battery-constrained devices. While encoders can be configured to produce bitstreams that are decoder-friendly, estimating the decoding complexity and energy overhead for a given video is non-trivial. In this study, we systematically analyse the impact of disabling various coding tools and adjusting coding parameters in two AV1 encoders, libaom-av1 and SVT-AV1. Using system-level energy measurement tools like RAPL (Running Average Power Limit), Intel SoC Watch (integrated with VTune profiler), we quantify the resulting trade-offs between decoding complexity, energy consumption, and compression efficiency for decoding a bitstream. Our results demonstrate that specific encoder configurations can substantially reduce decoding complexity with minimal perceptual quality degradation. For libaom-av1, disabling CDEF, an in-loop filter gives us a mean reduction in decoding cycles by 10%. For SVT-AV1, using the in-built, fast-decode=2 preset achieves a more substantial 24% reduction in decoding cycles. These findings provide strategies for content providers to lower the energy footprint of AV1 video streaming.

Demystifying the use of Compression in Virtual Production

Virtual Production (VP) technologies have continued to improve the flexibility of on-set filming and enhance the live concert experience. The core technology of VP relies on high-resolution, high-brightness LED panels to playback/render video content. There are a number of technical challenges to effective deployment e.g. image tile synchronisation across the panels, cross panel colour balancing and compensating for colour fluctuations due to changes in camera angles. Given the complexity and potential quality degradation, the industry prefers "pristine" or lossless compressed source material for displays, which requires significant storage and bandwidth. Modern lossy compression standards like AV1 or H.265 could maintain the same quality at significantly lower bitrates and resource demands. There is yet no agreed methodology for assessing the impact of these standards on quality when the VP scene is recorded in-camera. We present a methodology to assess this impact by comparing lossless and lossy compressed footage displayed through VP screens and recorded in-camera. We assess the quality impact of HAP/NotchLC/Daniel2 and AV1/HEVC/H.264 compression bitrates from 2 Mb/s to 2000 Mb/s with various GOP sizes. Several perceptual quality metrics are then used to automatically evaluate in-camera picture quality, referencing the original uncompressed source content through the LED wall. Our results show that we can achieve the same quality with hybrid codecs as with intermediate encoders at orders of magnitude less bitrate and storage requirements.

Unravelling the Power of Single-Pass Look-Ahead in Modern Codecs for Optimized Transcoding Deployment

Modern video encoders have evolved into sophisticated pieces of software in which various coding tools interact with each other. In the past, singlepass encoding was not considered for Video-On-Demand (VOD) use cases. In this work, we evaluate production-ready encoders for H.264 (x264), H.265 (HEVC), AV1 (SVT-AV1) along with direct comparisons to the latest AV1 encoder inside NVIDIA GPUs (40 series), and AWS Mediaconvert's AV1 implementation. Our experimental results demonstrate single pass encoding inside modern encoder implementations can give us very good quality at a reasonable compute cost. The results are presented as three different scenarios targeting High, Medium, and Low complexity accounting quality/bitrate/compute load. Finally, a set of recommendations is presented for end-users to help decide which encoder/preset combination might be more suited to their use case.