Towards much better SVT-AV1 quality-cycles tradeoffs for VOD applications

Software video encoders that have been developed based on the AVC, HEVC, VP9, and AV1 video coding standards have provided improved compression efficiency but at the cost of large increases in encoding complexity. As a result, there is currently no software video encoder that provides competitive quality-cycles tradeoffs extending from the AV1 high-quality range to the AVC low-complexity range. This paper describes methods based on the dynamic optimizer (DO) approach to further improve the SVT-AV1 overall quality-cycles tradeoffs for high-latency Video on Demand (VOD) applications. First the performance of the SVT-AV1 encoder is evaluated using the conventional DO approach, and then using the combined DO approach that accounts for all the encodings being considered in the selection of the encoding parameters. A fast parameter selection approach is then discussed. The latter allow for up to a 10x reduction in the complexity of the combined DO approach with minimal BD-rate loss.