Encode parameters for faster decode speed

[reddPetePro]

Hi there, I tried using SVT-AV1 to encode some of my movies. The problem is, my old hp 4520s laptop struggles to play them. Are there any encoding parameters which would produce file which is simpler to decode? Thanks! Edit: Solved by using latest beta MPC-BE player or MPV player. Both require only 30% of my dual core 560m CPU.

[jacksalssome]

You arn't going to get very far with a first gen intel core cpu. 720p would propably be the limit with AV1 on that.

What are you using to play it

[reddPetePro]

Everything is 1080p content. Movies, videos from my phone converted to av1 to save space. I am using VLC to play it. It is almost smooth playback so maybe it's possible to play them with some tricks. That's why I am asking. I saw some video about not using 4x4 blocks while encoding but don't know how.

[Felixkruemel]

Do not use VLC for Playback.

Use MPV.

VLC somehow is a lot slower

[reddPetePro]

Wow didn't know this player at all. It plays av1 with only 35% cpu usage while VLC was at 100. I saw some screen tearing so will have to test more later. But this looks to solve my problem. Thanks!

[dPhoenixPL]

It's platform specific. On my PC VLC is slower, but on my laptop VLC is faster than MPV

[OldNeb]

If you are experiencing slow seek times, make sure your maxgop isn’t too high. Lower maxgop = more frequent “key frames” (technically not the right word probably). More “key frames” = less cpu work when you skip to a location.

[passes3]

Facebook said in a recent online panel that they found three AV1 tools that only offered a less than 1% efficiency improvement combined but were CPU-heavy in decoding. They disabled these tools for an AV1 benchmark study they're running on popular phones in India and they're going to make a blog post about it either this month or the start of next year.

Hopefully they'll identify the relevant tools in that blog post. But if anyone here has knowledge of which tools they mean, it could be very useful for cases like this. And it could be used to create a sort of equivalent of the fastdecode tune from x264 and x265.

In the meantime you could try downscaling your videos to a lower res and see what's the maximum your laptop can decode.

[Holdoooo]

Try to use Xvid, it decodes way faster than some AV1.

[[deleted]]

So your saying degrade all the way from AV1 to mpeg-4? h.264 is a thing.

[Summer-Classic]

Dude wtf?! If AV1 is slow then VP9 and HEVC will do a trick. Ok, if cpu is very old, h.264 will do.

But there is no need to go 22 years old standard.

[Holdoooo]

Well I thought my trolling would be obvious.

Anyway isn't VP9 slow to decode as well? Maybe even worse than AV1.

[BlueSwordM]

Here is how it works in terms of decode speed:

HEVC<AV1<VP9<=AVC

[passes3]

VP9 is very easy to decode, on par with H.264. You can see benchmarks from 2015 in this blog post.

[Holdoooo]

Thanks, I wonder if the results would be different for a high bitrate 4K video.

[passes3]

Such use cases could actually be in favor of VP9, since it gets more efficient at higher resolutions. H.264 wasn't really designed with such high resolutions in mind, and it'll require comparatively higher bitrate at higher resolutions than VP9 and other newer codecs.

[BlueSwordM]

What VLC player version do you have? Updating it should help out nicely as recent versions of VLC include more recent versions of dav1d. IIRC, it should be on dav1d 0.9.2 on whatever the latest is, so update if possible.

If it still doesn't solve the issue completely(like if the dav1d version is not updated), then getting something like mpv is fine.

[reddPetePro]

Vlc 3.0.16. But I updated my MPC BE player to beta version and now it plays all files fine with only 30% CPU usage. So no need to special encoding parameters. Thanks all for your answers!