Yesterday, the team behind DAV1D released DAV1D 0.2.0, the open-source AV1 video decoder which focuses on helping older desktop CPUs and mobile devices. The initial release, Dav1d 0.1 which was released three months ago, featured hand-written AVX2 code for running faster than the reference decoder on modern Intel/AMD CPUs. Though the stable version of DAV1D 0.2.0 is yet to be released.
What’s new in DAV1D 0.2.0
SSSE3 Support
The SSSE3 support is aimed at scaling the performance potential for older desktop CPUs. As per the Steam Hardware Survey (Feb. 2019), 97,23% of their user base supports SSSE3.
x86 performance
Dav1d 0.1.0 didn’t support older and lower-end processors but this release comes with support for processors not supporting AVX2. Also, there is NEON SIMD support now for ARM hardware. The performance of AVX2 has increased from 1% to 2% for dav1d.
Mobile: NEON
During the previous release, the speed using NEON assembly over C was around 80% which has been doubled now with DAV1D 0.2.0.
Arm64 performance
Performance for Arm64 has improved as there is 38% improvement for single-thread and a 53% improvement for multi-thread performances.
32-bit Arm (Armv7)
The 32-bit Arm (Armv7) has also improved as most assembly code can be fairly easily ported.
Major bug fixes
- This release comes with rewrite inverse transforms for avoiding overflows.
- The issues with un-decodable samples have been fixed.
To know more about this news, check out the official post on Medium.
Read Next
dav1d 0.1.0, the AV1 decoder by VideoLAN, is here
dav1d to release soon with all features of AV1, and better performance than libaom
Presenting dav1d, a new lightweight AV1 decoder, by VideoLAN and FFmpeg
