This blog post is based on a series of visual quality benchmarks with SSIMULACRA2 and speed benchmarks of SVT-AV1 1.8.0 on a corpus of animated clips.

The resources available will range from graphs to image comparisons (WIP). The former has the advantage of being easily understandable, showcasing pure efficiency comparisons between encoder parameters using metrics as the reference, while the latter are image samples from the encoded files during the tests that enable you to check quality for yourself and add another layer of subjective interpretation to these comparisons.

A 567.14 MB, 12 min 11 s, 2K (2,048 x 858), VP9 + Opus, 6.51 Mbps average, Blender short film "Cosmos Laundromat"

A Scenario​

While chatting in your favorite Discord servers & group chats, you may see a friend send a weird link. You might even consider it suspicious on first glance. It is a video featuring an image of a movie poster with a play button that is almost begging to be clicked. Naturally, you click it.

This guide will show you how to encode in AV1 the right and optimal way. Yes, you using standalone libaom, libsvtav1, and librav1e from FFmpeg or even piping yuv4mpeg into mainline aomenc are all unoptimal.

A big part of understanding any multimedia codec technology is knowing the application for such technology. For images, a big use case is web delivery. Compared to other multimedia, images are incredibly popular on the Web & knowing how to serve them properly can be a massive boon to your website's traffic as well as less of a headache for users on slower connections or who are under bandwidth constraints. The most disappointing part is that images are often poorly done on the web; all too frequently will you run into a site serving massive photographic PNGs for no reason, or photography sites serving photographs fresh out of the editing software with no thought put into their final delivery. A little effort, patience, & knowledge will go a long way toward improving the user experience for individuals using your site, & this article will illustrate some of the basics.