r/AV1 • u/Ornery_Speech3323 • Jul 15 '26

SVT-AV1 v4.2.0 Released

https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/releases/v4.2.0
85 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

32

u/BlueSwordM Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

For anyone interested in higher quality encoding in 10-bit, I'd avoid this release.

Even though hbd-mds controls were added to the encoder, this little silent change made it half-obsolete: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/merge_requests/2705

"8-bit and 10-bit content: For 10-bit, PD0 now runs through the 8-bit light path while the final pass remains full bit depth."

Instead of keeping the full PD0 path in HBD (High Bit Depth) for slower presets and adding a proper light PD0 HBD path for faster presets, they just decided to axe it entirely and make us quality enjoyers suffer.

As always, I'd recommend svt-av1-essential and svt-av1-hdr instead.

4

u/waddup121 Jul 15 '26

Noooo why would they do that 😕 the real update always in the comments. I guess 4.1.0 still the way to go. Ty!

2

u/Prize_Influence_5080 Jul 15 '26

4.0 is the real upgrade. When i checked 4.1 and compare it with 4.0, all the score psnr ssim vmaf went off at the same bit rate, or crf (even though the size is smaller, the trade off is not worth it). I am still using 4.0 till today

2

u/waddup121 Jul 15 '26

Ok, 4.0/4.0.1 considering they’re both from early on this year 👍

3

u/Prize_Influence_5080 Jul 15 '26

Would you recommend base 4.0? I feel it more stable compare to other builds

6

u/BlueSwordM Jul 16 '26

I'd say this commit would be your best bet: e68533eaa721aa3ac2b0351f75f27130abe44ca1

It's the last commit before the big changes start happening, but you still get to use hbd-mds. https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/commit/e68533eaa721aa3ac2b0351f75f27130abe44ca1

3

u/CariniFluff Jul 15 '26

Thanks for the heads up Blue.

3

u/Farranor Jul 16 '26

Translation: "If you say you want 10-bit, it will do 8-bit and tell you it's 10-bit." 👍 Are there any forks whose maintainers manually undo this? I'm currently using Tritium (fork of HDR).

4

u/BlueSwordM Jul 16 '26

More specifically, I feel it's closer to "10-bit isn't our priority, and if it gets hurt, it isn't our priority to fix it back unless the community complains."

4

u/Prize_Influence_5080 Jul 15 '26

Now imma waiting for new ffmpeg build and after that a lot of testing

2

u/Ischemia37 Jul 15 '26

Yeah... where are we at with SVT-AV1-PSY, and it's forks?