rav1e

rav1e is a command line application for encoding AV1 written in Rust & Assembly co-developed by Xiph.org and Mozilla.

rav1e is available in FFmpeg via librav1e. You can check if you have it by running ffmpeg -h encoder=librav1e. You can input non-FFmpeg standard rav1e parameters via -rav1e-params. Please keep in mind that unless you build FFmpeg yourself, you are using the most vanilla version of rav1e.

Installation

Linux & macOS

Official pre-built rav1e binaries can be found on the releases page in rav1e’s Github repository. Unofficially, the rAV1ator CLI command line tool can automatically download and install rav1e to /usr/local/bin. rav1e can also be installed with Cargo by running cargo install rav1e.

Stable Release

For stability & a proper version number, please reset the source to the correct release commit. In the releases page, click the icon to the right of the release tag & copy the commit in the url bar. Then, in the cloned rav1e directory, git reset --hard [commit hash]

Here are instructions for resetting to release 0.7.1 (latest as of 19 Feb 2024) and building. Omit the git reset command to use the latest git, if you have a specific reason to use the latest git instead of an official tagged release.

git clone https://github.com/xiph/rav1e.git
cd rav1e
git reset --hard a8d05d0c43826a465b60dbadd0ab7f1327d75371
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release

When done, the binary can be found in /target/release. You can then copy the binary wherever you desire it to go, like by doing cp /target/release/rav1e /usr/local/bin .

Patched Installation with HDR10+ support

rav1e currently has an unmerged pull request by quietvoid, the person behind hdr10plus_tool and dovi_tool. The PR adds a new parameter called --hdr10plus-json for HDR10+ JSON dynamic metadata input. To merge it locally, do the following:

git clone https://github.com/xiph/rav1e.git
cd rav1e
git reset --hard [release commit]
git fetch origin pull/3000/head:HDR10+

Now the patch should be applied, and you may build as usual.

Windows

If you would not like to build from source, official pre-built rav1e binaries can be found on the releases page in rav1e’s Github repository.

:::info Stable Release For stability & a proper version number, please reset the source to the correct release commit. In the releases page, click the icon to the right of the release tag & copy the commit in the url bar. Then, in the cloned rav1e directory, git reset --hard [commit hash] :::

Here are instructions for resetting to release 0.7.1 (latest as of 19 Feb 2024) and building. Omit the git reset command to use the latest git, if you have a specific reason to use the latest git instead of an official tagged release.

git clone https://github.com/xiph/rav1e.git
cd rav1e
git reset --hard a8d05d0c43826a465b60dbadd0ab7f1327d75371
set RUSTFLAGS=-C target-cpu=native
cargo build --release

When done, the binary can be found in target/release

AV1

For AV1 encoding, rav1e has very sane defaults. It is very hard to go wrong with parameters if you modify as few as possible.

Basic usage:

rav1e -i input.y4m -o output.ivf --quantizer 60 --photon-noise 8

Basic usage with FFmpeg piping, 10bit input:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -strict -2 -f yuv4mpegpipe - | rav1e - -o output.ivf --quantizer 80 --photon-noise 8

Basic usage with FFmpeg piping, 10bit input and assuming 4K:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -strict -2 -f yuv4mpegpipe - | rav1e - -o output.ivf --quantizer 68 --tile-columns 2 --tile-rows 1 --photon-noise 8

1. Use 2x1 tiles or tile-columns 2 and tile-rows 1 for 4K (2160p) encoding, this will help with both encoding and decoding.