Performance of AV1 Real-Time Mode

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the real-time performance of AV1 and other codecs, focusing on latency and throughput in practical scenarios with a new testing setup and quality assessments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel test setup for real-time codec evaluation and compares AV1 with other codecs in terms of speed and quality under real-time conditions.

Findings

AV1 shows competitive real-time encoding performance.

The new test setup effectively simulates real-time media capture.

Quality measurements indicate AV1's potential for real-time applications.

Abstract

With COVID-19, the interest for digital interactions has raised, putting in turn real-time (or low-latency) codecs into a new light. Most of the codec research has been traditionally focusing on coding efficiency, while very little literature exist on real-time codecs. It is shown how the speed at which content is made available impacts both latency and throughput. The authors introduce a new test set up, integrating a paced reader, which allows to run codec in the same condition as real-time media capture. Quality measurements using VMAF, as well as multiple speed measurements are made on encoding of HD and full HD video sequences, both at 25 fps and 50 fps to compare the respective performances of several implementations of the H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9 and AV1 codecs.