I'm developing a VoD application as a white label product that runs in a SaaS context using K8s. To enable streaming, I take the input video and re-convert it into HLS segments in multiple version and codecs to reach maximum compatibility.
Yesterday I started implementing AV1 as codec, as it will in near future detach h264 as it's more efficient with the same level of compatibility across all the available browsers. That was the point where things started to get strange, as I want to have this codec instead of h264 ^^.
If you take a look at the following doc pages from ffmpeg: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1
You will notice that there are 3 main encoders available to handle encoding to av1. These are: libaom, SVT-AV1 and rav1e. No matter which one of these I try, the performance is slow, even slower than with HEVC. Recently I came along a news article about Netflix and that they are upgrading their library to AV1. If I take a look at the numbers of media elements Netflix offers, the amount is just huge, and I really don't understand how they did it. From what I know, SVT-AV1 is developed by Netflix in cooperation with Intel, So I assume they somehow rely on hardware encoding using an Intel CPU extension.
Does somebody maybe know more and how they did it? I really can't imagine that they just do CPU only encoding. A movie would take days to get encoded.
Thanks in advance
Encoding quality and quality differs heavily between all encoders. SVT-AV1 is the fastest but looks like garbage. For real-time encoding you should probably use GPU's. Intels GPU's don't really put out great quality AV1 encodes though, Nvidia's H265 is basically the same quality.
With Nvidia and AMD soon getting AV1 encoding hardware support (currently drivers are a bit lacking but it's already possible on Nvidia). AMD GPU's coming out for it soon.