Add AV1 support for video encoding
I would love to see blender support for the new AV1 video codec.
The AV1 or AOMedia Video 1 video codec is an open, royalty-free video coding format by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Some memebers of the AOMedia are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia and Samsung Electronics.
- See also: AV1 codec on Wikipedia
h.264 and h.265 are widely adopted and deliver a good quality to size ratio with h.265 designed to be twice as efficient as h.264. However, both are licenced by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and are, as of now, only
free to use
.
At some point the MPEG tried to charge money for their codec (so also it's use on YouTube) which led to the development of VP9 (and AV1 as it's successor). While VP9 was at about the quality-to-size-ratio level as h.264, AV1 aims to be at the level of h.265.
Because there are so many big companies behind AV1 and AV1 is under good way, I think it's fair to say that AV1 will be THE next open video codec.
Since blender is an open source project and already supports VP9, HuffYUV and FFV1 I think it's not only a consequent but rhe right idea to add support for the AV1 codec.
4 Comments
AFAIK, Blender uses FFMPEG for some of its encoding. And AV1 seem to be supported by FFMPEG itself .
So, in theory, Blender can use AV1. But it just needs the UI for that.
And I guess you'll revieve the same answers I got for my proposal about x265 :
Besides that, the UI and Python API are oficially frozen from 24th may to 2.80's release, somewhere un July if everything goes well.
* @-L0Lock- * Is there an official thread for redesigning the encoding panes? To be honest: I didn't expect this be be included in 2.80.
Including new codecs usually takes a lot of testing, failing and re-testing. But since blender is not finished with 2.80, I would hope for 2.81
* @Delta * I don't know if there is one. But nothing prevents you from creating one on devtalk.blender.org ;)
IHMO the best thing that could be done on top of a re-design & more options, is to allow some form of "advanced mode" with ffmpeg allowing to use command lines from blender, so that anyone knowing ffmpeg can use its full potential even if Blender UI doesn't. (ffmpeg is so full of features anyway...).
* @Delta * In addition to -L0Lock-'s suggestions, UI re-designs are really where our user community can provide some insight as well. Make mock-ups that show how you expect things to work and behave.