Intel and Netflix to deliver an AV1 scalable codec

Intel and Netflix announced a new high-performance video codec that is available as open source and royalty-free to content creators, developers and service providers. Scalable Video Technology for AV1 (SVT-AV1) offers performance and scalability in video processing.

Intel VP Lynn Comp says, "The SVT-AV1 codec offers both high performance and efficiency. And compared to today's most popular codec (H.264 AVC), SVT-AV1 can help service providers save up to half their bandwidth, delivering leading-edge user experiences that can be quickly and cost-effectively delivered at a global scale.

This codec makes it possible for services ranging from video on demand to live broadcast of 4Kp60/10-bit content on Intel Xeon Scalable processors, including the recently launched 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor.

Modernisation of video software codecs for increased efficiency will help deliver rich user experiences and reach global scale, accelerating time to market and lowering costs for developers and service providers.

SVT-AV1 is a software-based scalable codec offering the best trade-offs among performance, latency and visual quality when working with visual cloud workloads. SVT-AV1 performance advantages are based on the SVT architecture, which is a cohesive and highly optimised codec architecture that already has delivered multiple generations of codecs, including SVT-HEVC, SVT-VP9 and SVT-AV1.

The new SVT-AV1 codec is unique in that it allows encoders to scale their performance levels based on the quality and latency requirements of the target applications — ranging from highest quality video on demand (VOD) to live streaming use cases.

The high-quality encoding and decoding in SVT-AV1 will enable developers working with visual cloud workloads to get them to market faster. The codec is optimised for video encoding on Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

In addition, Intel launched the Open Visual Cloud, an open source project that includes a set of use case-optimised reference pipelines for visual workloads.

These developer-ready pipelines are based on open source media, artificial intelligence (AI) and graphics software ingredients. They support the most popular open source frameworks that developers are familiar with.

SVT, the OpenVINO Toolkit and the Intel Rendering Framework are all part of the Open Visual Cloud, bringing highly optimised open source to encode/decode, inference and graphics together as an interoperable reference for services innovation. The first two pipelines enable services for the content delivery network (CDN) transcode VOD streaming and intelligent ad insertion.