ab-av1 is a command-line video encoding tool designed to remove much of the guesswork involved in selecting an appropriate constant-rate-factor value.
Rather than requiring users to encode an entire video repeatedly while experimenting with quality settings, ab-av1 can encode short samples, measure the resulting perceptual quality and search for a CRF that meets a requested target. Once it has selected an appropriate value, the same tool can perform the complete encode through FFmpeg.
Although its name highlights AV1, it can also work with other compatible FFmpeg encoders.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Automatically searches for an encoding CRF that meets a specified minimum quality target.
- Uses short sample encodes to avoid repeatedly processing the complete source.
- Performs an interpolated binary search across candidate CRF values.
- Reports the mean VMAF score produced by its samples.
- Predicts the size of the completed encode.
- Estimates the time required to encode the full input.
- Supports XPSNR as an alternative quality metric.
- Can calculate complete VMAF scores by comparing distorted and reference media.
- Provides a corresponding command for full XPSNR calculations.
- Works with both videos and images.
- Selects an appropriate VMAF model according to source resolution.
- Can upscale lower-resolution media for quality analysis when required.
- Provides JSON output for integration with scripts and other software.
- Can verify a completed encode by decoding it and checking its duration against the source.
- Offers fail-fast encoding to stop when FFmpeg reports an error instead of retaining a damaged result.
- Supports FFmpeg-compatible encoders beyond AV1, including H.264 and H.265 implementations.
Website: github.com/alexheretic/ab-av1
Support:
Developer: Alex Butler
License: MIT License
ab-av1 is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Video Converters | |
|---|---|
| HandBrake | Multithreaded cross-platform media transcoding application |
| FFmpeg | Multimedia player, server and encoder |
| Shutter Encoder | Graphical frontend to FFmpeg with editing features |
| FastFlix | GUI for H.264, HEVC and AV1 hardware and software encoding |
| Videomass | Cross-platform GUI for FFmpeg and youtube-dl |
| avconv | Part of libav-tools; fork of FFmpeg |
| VLC | Vdeo player which also converts multimedia to different formats |
| mpv | Cross-platform media player with video encoding support |
| MEncoder | MEncoder is included in MPlayer |
| FFQueue | Graphical frontend to FFmpeg written in C++ |
| Edconv | User-friendly FFmpeg GUI |
| transcode | Utility to encode raw video/audio streams |
| OmniGet | Uses FFmpeg to perform the video conversion |
| MystiQ | GUI for FFmpeg, a powerful media converter |
| Frame | Desktop media conversion utility |
| ffdash | VP9 video encoder |
| Constrict | Compress videos to target sizes |
| Leonardo | Media conversion application |
| Ciano | Easy way to convert your multimedia files to the most popular formats |
| Recoder | GTK4 video transcoding application |
| VidCom | Simple utility for video archiving and compression |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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