Happy Wednesday to all of you wonderful readers.

We’ve updated, improved, and polished the latest svt-av1-psy release. I’ll make it quick and will start with the changelog:

-> MAIN CHANGES:

• New parameter: --tf-strength. This parameter is used for manually adjusting alt-ref frame temporal filtering strength. By default, this reduces temporal filtering strength by 4x.

• New parameters: --chroma-qm-min & --chroma-qm-max. These parameters control quantization matrix flatness for chroma planes (higher number is flatter and introduces fewer quantization changes).

• New parameter: --tune 4 - A new Tune called Still Picture has been introduced for AVIF encoding, with promising gains observed mainline SVT-AV1 and even over aomenc (libaom-av1) in some scenarios.

• All the performance improvements from mainline SVT-AV1 from more advanced pruning, program optimizations and CPU optimizations.

-> TUNING:

• Enable 10-bit subpixel motion estimation processing for 10-bit inputs on Preset 3 & below, for better motion clarity

• Enable SUPERRES_AUTO_ALL for Tune 3 when superres-mode=4 for better visual quality when enabling “super-resolution”

• Disables ALT-REF frame superres for speed and quality improvements

• Add unipred bias for SSIM full mode decision cost when using Tune 3 for better visual quality

• New perceptual QM curve when using Tune 3 for improved visual quality

• Better chroma QM adjustment & better high fidelity performance

• Vastly improved screen content detection when --scm 2 is set. Currently only enabled in Tune 4. May eventually be accessible globally for better adaptive encoding performance…

-> DOCUMENTATION:

• --help menu correctly prints maximum CRF value (70)

• Default Tune 2 is better reflected across documentation

• Updated build documentation

• Additional featured projects

-> BUG FIXES:

• Scoped down QM disablement to only affect NEON-enabled systems
• Scoped down global sharpness features to --sharpness 1, as was the original intention

-> SUPPORT US:

As SVT-AV1-PSY’s codebase has become more complex and the encoder’s capabilities have increased dramatically, our efforts have scaled in kind. If you appreciate the work that we do, you can support us monetarily via the links below:

• Gianni Rosato: Donate
• Julio Barba: Coming Soon
• BlueSwordM: Coming Soon:tm:
• Clybius: Coming Soon

Any support you can offer goes a long way, and we sincerely appreciate it. ♥️

PRs (Code Pull Requests), issue opening and general bug hunting are extremely appreciated as well as they make our work a whole lot easier.