Around a month ago, Codec Wiki celebrates it's very first anniversary as it officially hits one year old (Wow, that's a very long time!).

First and foremost, I apologize for this delayed celebration post, I have been very busy for the past month, y'know, real life things. Second of all, I would like to say THANK YOU for everyone who helped build this wiki from the ground up and writing down the entries, you know who you are!

Stats​

Thanks to everyone's efforts, over the course of 12 months Codec Wiki has grown into the (almost) go-to documentation and guide for newcomers just starting out in the quirky and wild world of multimedia encoding. So here are some pretty graphs to look at our progress so far!

Plausible​

As you may know, we run our own Plausible Analytics instance. Which is a self-hosted, open source, and privacy-respecting analytics. Currently hosted in Singapore and available for everyone to view here.

7.7K unique total visitors for a whole year may not be much but it's a great start!

Let's not forget those who use uBlock Origin or similar to block the analytics script. So the visitor count could be two or three times more!

Google Search Console​

For those who are unfamiliar, Google Search Console is used for viewing well.. Google search data for your website. This data is unfortunately private and only the owner and those invited can see the data, no setting available for public view. Probably for the better.

And for our top 10 search queries in the last 28 days:

With pretty much zero competition in this niche of a market, it skyrocketed Codec Wiki to the top of search results for everything multimedia related 😅.

A Brief History​

Around a year ago, I started work on an unofficial "wiki" for all things encoding, it initially started as a half-serious joke because I was annoyed there were no good documentation available anywhere on the internet on the real application and usage of encoders such as "Should I use tune SSIM in x encoder?". With the search results you'll be presented with being one or more of these:

• Doesn't exist.
• Mentioned in the FFmpeg mailing list but nothing else.
• PDF research papers on IEEE and similar.
• Outdated information on Doom9 or Multimedia Wiki.
• "The documentation are in the code blocks".
• Link rot.
• Abandoned, or mostly focused on other topics.
• Focused on a specific type of storytelling medium.
• Actual good explanation in an old forgotten site (rare).

Some or maybe even most of these results still appear up to this day.

Frustrated with how scarce information is available on the open internet and combined with the fact that most, if not all of them only exist in non-search-engine-reachable private chat communities such as Discord where you'll have to join and scroll around older conversations.

Prone to data erasure as Discord can nuke these servers for whatever reason they please and years of "documentation" is lost in an instant. It is simply not a good platform for a plethora of valuable information.

That's why I took initiative.

Bumps in the Road​

There were also generally a lot of distrust and pushbacks when this project first began, particularly from those who are more experienced with encoding. Which is understandable because everyone who attempted before burned out and never finished it.

But Codec Wiki stood the test of time with constant updates through active collaboration of everyone involved, nowadays those voices have mostly subsided or even joined the project themselves. And I am grateful for that.

Closing Statement​

Once again, THANK YOU VERY MUCH for those who are involved in this project and making the once pipe dream of a one-stop-shop user-friendly documentation for encoding into something that's possible.

Let's continue documenting the most crucial yet invisible driving force of internet traffic, pages by pages.

Together we are strong, divided we burn out.

"There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends."

— Anton Ego

AV1 for Dummies is a comprehensive, legible guide on how to get started with AV1 at any experience level. Whether you're on Windows using your first video encoding program, or a seasoned Linux user looking to optimize your encoding pipeline, this guide has you covered.

SVT-AV1, the most scalable AV1 encoder, has received a new update and one may wonder if the old presets recommendation still holds today. We will delve into that in this blog post, based on a series of speed and visual quality benchmarks with SSIMULACRA2 and XPSNR of SVT-AV1 2.1.0 on a corpus of varied animated clips.

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.