One of my more recent and ambitious projects was to convert my media library of Movies, TV Shows, and Twitch VODs from the various formats that they are in and re-encode them into the new and highly efficient AV1 format.
For those of you who might not be familiar, AV1 is an open, royalty-free video coding format sponsored and created by some of the biggest tech companies out there. As an advocate of open source software, I’m very pleased that this useful codec is being shared freely and openly for everyone to make use of and will ensure a more efficient future web since we *LOVE* our videos!
So I decided to get some specialized hardware, namely an Intel Arc A580 from Amazon and put it into my spare computer which is equipped with a AMD Ryzen 5 5600G and 16GB of RAM and put it to work!
I was considerably impressed when I transformed an episode of Battlestar Galactica from 1.7GB to 422MB without any special encoder settings! That’s practically cutting it in a quarter of its previously HVAC encoded size! It moved along at a decent speed of 8x or so, and I was pleased but naturally wanted to see if I could do more.
So I began researching and came across this post here on Level One Tech Forum: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/ffmpeg-av1-encoding-using-intel-arc-gpu-tips/205120
I applied the optimizations recommended because frankly ffmpeg command line switches are like wizardry and I’m certainly not an expert. This helped reduce the file size of the same encoding down to only 396MB! However that came at a price as the encoding speed was reduced to just under 4x now. It will likely be worth the tradeoff in the long run I’d say.
Getting here is half the fun as they say, and getting this set up on Ubuntu (well in this case I chose Kubuntu because I like the interface better) wasn’t too terrible. The version of ffmpeg in the repos comes compiled with Intel’s Quickstep support ready to go. The only hurdle was installing Intel’s GPU drivers which is straightforward enough from their website’s documentation.
I will continue to experiment with this and report back on my findings!
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