blog/data/2022-04-16-debian-av1.txt

   1 Title: Playing and encoding AV1 in Debian Bullseye
   2 Tags: english, standard, video
   3 Date: 2022-04-16 08:40
   4
   5 <p>Inspired by the recent news of
   6 <a href="https://slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/2039219/intel-beats-amd-and-nvidia-with-arc-gpus-full-av1-support">AV1
   7 hardware encoding support from Intel</a>, I decided to look into
   8 the state of AV1 on Linux today.  AV1 is a
   9 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160618103850/http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free
  10 and open standard</a> as defined by Digistan without any royalty
  11 payment requirement, unlike its much used competitor encoding
  12 H.264.  While looking, I came across an 5 year
  13 <a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/1061908/how-to-encode-and-playback-video-with-the-av1-codec-on-bionic-beaver-18-04">old
  14 question on askubuntu.com</a> which in turn inspired me to check out
  15 how things are in Debian Stable regarding AV1.  The test file listed
  16 in the question (askubuntu_test_aom.mp4) did not exist any more, so I
  17 tracked down a different set of test files on
  18 <a href="https://av1.webmfiles.org/">av1.webmfiles.org</a> to test them
  19 with the various video tools I had installed on my machine.  I was
  20 happy to discover that AV1 decoding and playback worked with almost
  21 every tool I tested:
  22
  23 <table align="center">
  24 <tr><td>mediainfo</td>       <td>ok</td></tr>
  25 <tr><td>dragonplayer</td>    <td>ok</td></tr>
  26 <tr><td>ffmpeg / ffplay</td> <td>ok</td></tr>
  27 <tr><td>gnome-mplayer</td>   <td>fail</td></tr>
  28 <tr><td>mplayer</td>         <td>ok</td></tr>
  29 <tr><td>mpv</td>             <td>ok</td></tr>
  30 <tr><td>parole</td>          <td>ok</td></tr>
  31 <tr><td>vlc</td>             <td>ok</td></tr>
  32 <tr><td>firefox</td>         <td>ok</td></tr>
  33 <tr><td>chromium</td>        <td>ok</td></tr>
  34 </table>
  35
  36 <p>AV1 encoding is available in Debian Stable from the aom-tools
  37 version 1.0.0.errata1-3 package, using the aomenc tool.  The encoding
  38 using the package in Debian Stable is quite slow, with the frame rate
  39 for my 10 second test video at around 0.25 fps.  My 10 second video
  40 test took 16 minutes and 11 seconds on my test machine.</p>
  41
  42 <p>I tested by first running ffmpeg and then aomenc using the recipe
  43 provided by the askubuntu recipe above.  I had to remove the
  44 '--row-mt=1' option, as it was not supported in my 1.0.0 version.  The
  45 encoding only used a single thread, according to <tt>top</tt>.</p>
  46
  47 <blockquote><pre>
  48 ffmpeg -i some-old-video.ogv -t 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p video.y4m
  49 aomenc --fps=24/1 -u 0 --codec=av1 --target-bitrate=1000 \
  50   --lag-in-frames=25 --auto-alt-ref=1 -t 24 --cpu-used=8 \
  51   --tile-columns=2 --tile-rows=2 -o output.webm video.y4m
  52 </pre></blockquote>
  53
  54 <p>As version 1.0.0 currently have several
  55 <a href="https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/aom">unsolved
  56 security issues in Debian Stable</a>, and to see if the recent
  57 backport <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/aom">provided in
  58 Debian</a> is any quicker, I ran <tt>apt -t bullseye-backports install
  59 aom-tools</tt> to fetch the backported version and re-encoded the
  60 video using the latest version.  This time the '--row-mt=1' option
  61 worked, and the encoding was done in 46 seconds with a frame rate of
  62 around 5.22 fps.  This time it seem to be using all my four cores to
  63 encode.  Encoding speed is still too low for streaming and real time,
  64 which would require frame rates above 25 fps, but might be good enough
  65 for offline encoding.</p>
  66
  67 <p>I am very happy to see AV1 playback working so well with the
  68 default tools in Debian Stable.  I hope the encoding situation improve
  69 too, allowing even a slow old computer like my 10 year old laptop to
  70 be used for encoding.</p>
  71
  72 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  73 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  74 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>