aom-psy101

Under Maintenance

The content in this entry is incomplete & is in the process of being completed.

Community Fork

This entry is about a fork of aomenc called aom-psy101. If you'd like to learn about the mainline aomenc encoder before reading, visit our aomenc wiki entry.

Mainline aomenc is unfortunately not perfect. It suffers from bad defaults, a heavy focus on the perceptually flawed PSNR metric, misleading settings, and other issues. Fortunately, there are a couple of forks developed by the encoding community that were created to combat aomenc's underlying issues.

• aom-av1-psy No longer maintained as of 13th January 2023
• aom-av1-lavish No longer maintained as of 4th June 2024
• aom-psy101
• aom-av1ador

These forks fix up the poor decisions made by the original AOM devs and most importantly introduce new parameters and tunes to help fine-tune the encoder even more.

aom-psy101 is a fork of aomenc that aims to improve the encoding quality and speed of AV1. It is developed by damian101, a talented AV1 community developer.

FFmpeg

aomenc is available in FFmpeg via libaom-av1, check if you have it by running ffmpeg -h encoder=libaom-av1. You can input non-FFmpeg standard aomenc parameters via -aom-params.

Mainline aomenc

Unless you compile FFmpeg yourself with aom-psy101, you will be using the mainline aomenc. Compiling from source yourself with the aomenc libraries provided by aom-psy101 is the only way to use it with FFmpeg.

Installation

Linux & macOS

1. Clone the psy101 repo:

Clone the psy101 repo

git clone https://gitlab.com/damian101/aom-psy101 aom
cd aom && mkdir aom_build && cd aom_build

2. Configure compilation. The following flags are set to ensure the aomenc binary is build for optimal performance:

Set CMake flags

cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=0 -DENABLE_DOCS=0 -DCONFIG_TUNE_BUTTERAUGLI=0 -DCONFIG_TUNE_VMAF=0 -DCONFIG_AV1_DECODER=0 -DENABLE_TESTS=0 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-flto -O3 -march=native" -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-flto -O3 -march=native -pipe -fno-plt" -DCMAKE_LD_FLAGS="-flto -O3 -march=native"

3. Compile:

Compile

make -j$(nproc)

4. Install to your system. This may require elevated privileges:

Install

make install

Windows

MSYS2 is the best option for building in Windows, as it provides a Unix-like environment for compilation.

0. Make sure you have downloaded & installed MSYS2 from the MSYS2 website before beginning the build process.

1. Start the UCRT64 console & install the required dependencies:

pacman -S cmake git perl yasm nasm python3 doxygen mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake base-devel

2. Clone the psy101 repo:

Clone the psy101 repo

git clone https://gitlab.com/damian101/aom-psy101 aom
cd aom && mkdir aom_build && cd aom_build

2. Configure compilation. The following flags are set to ensure the aomenc binary is build for optimal performance:

Set CMake flags

cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=0 -DENABLE_DOCS=0 -DCONFIG_TUNE_BUTTERAUGLI=0 -DCONFIG_TUNE_VMAF=0 -DCONFIG_AV1_DECODER=0 -DENABLE_TESTS=0 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-flto -O3 -march=native" -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-flto -O3 -march=native -pipe -fno-plt" -DCMAKE_LD_FLAGS="-flto -O3 -march=native"

3. Compile:

Compile

make -j$(nproc)

The resulting binary will be available within the home folder of the location where you installed MSYS2 (usually C:). Navigate there, and then to the aom folder; the binary should be there.

Built files should be in the "Debug" folder.