1 views collected around this technical thread.
The 全民K歌 app reduced video bandwidth by 59% and improved playback experience by adopting Tencent's TXAV1 encoder, achieving 60% AV1 playback share, 20% better compression than H.265, and extensive mobile device support through careful transcoding strategies and performance testing.
AV1, an open royalty‑free video codec finalized in 2018, delivers roughly 20 % lower bitrate than H.265 and is supported by major players and hardware, while Bilibili’s self‑developed BILIAV1 encoder, built from scratch, beats SVT‑AV1 by 15‑20 % bitrate at equal speed through advanced TRACE debugging, parallel processing and optimized algorithms, with future work targeting P2P and live‑streaming applications.
FFmpeg 6.0 "Von Neumann" introduces a host of new decoders, encoders, filters, hardware‑accelerated AV1 support, ABI versioning, and numerous performance and API improvements, marking a major, more structured release cycle for the multimedia framework.
This article details Tencent Cloud's self‑developed TXAV1 AV1 encoder, covering its evolution from V265, performance gains over competing codecs, compression‑rate improvements through pre‑analysis models, engineering acceleration techniques, and real‑world deployment in live streaming, video‑on‑demand, and AVIF image services.
Tencent's TXAV1 encoder, a self‑developed AV1 video codec, combines advanced compression‑rate improvements, engineering acceleration, and extensive cloud deployment, achieving up to 78‑334% speedup with minimal quality loss, and includes novel pre‑analysis models, adaptive quantization, and multi‑threading strategies for both video and image applications.
Video bitrate depends on content complexity, resolution, frame rate, and the chosen codec and bitrate‑control method, with modern encoders like HEVC and AV1 using advanced prediction, transform, quantization and entropy coding to dramatically reduce size while preserving perceived quality for smoother streaming.
iQIYI’s QAV1 encoder, which combines the next‑generation AV1 codec with deep‑learning techniques, delivers 20‑42% bandwidth savings and up to 36% higher compression efficiency than x265 while maintaining ultrafast 60 fps encoding speeds, enabling high‑quality 4K/8K streaming and live broadcast across devices.
In 2020, iQiyi’s technology product team released 127 articles spanning MySQL high‑availability, microservice architecture, automated monitoring, coroutine networking, and the QNSM traffic engine, while pioneering AI‑driven drama restoration, AV1 video coding, 2D‑to‑3D conversion, publishing four top‑conference papers and hosting two AI competitions that showcase technology’s role across the entire entertainment content pipeline.
The MSU World Video Codec Competition highlighted iQIYI’s QAV1 encoder achieving faster speeds and superior compression compared to H.265, while the expanding AV1 ecosystem—bolstered by widespread hardware decoding, platform adoption, and recent QAV1 enhancements such as 8K, HDR, and improved rate‑distortion optimization—promises higher quality video at lower bandwidth costs.
AV1, the royalty‑free video codec created by the Alliance for Open Media and supported by Tencent’s Multimedia Lab, combines advanced block partitioning, intra‑ and inter‑prediction, versatile transforms, sophisticated entropy coding, and loop‑filtering to cut bitrates by roughly 20% for streaming, cloud transcoding, 8K, VR, and medical imaging, while paving the way toward future AV2 and VVC standards.
iQIYI’s scientist Wang Zhihang explains that their home‑grown QAV1 AV1 encoder, built to overcome AV1’s high computational cost, delivers roughly five‑times faster encoding than SVT‑AV1 while matching compression efficiency, uses less than half the resources of x265, supports 1080p‑8K, multiple speed tiers, and is poised for broader hardware adoption as mobile SoCs add native AV1 decoding.
FFmpeg 4.3 has been released, adding support for TrueHD in MP4, Intel QSV‑accelerated MJPEG and VP9 decoding, Vulkan‑based AMD AMF encoding on Linux, AV1 encoding via rav1e, ZeroMQ, VDPAU VP9 decoding, and numerous filter enhancements.
Video encoding standards—from H.264 to AV1 and China’s AVS series—have successively doubled compression efficiency, lowering bandwidth and storage costs, while patent royalties steer industry adoption, prompting Chinese platforms like iQIYI to develop proprietary, high‑speed encoders and prepare for next‑gen codecs such as AVS3 and H.266.
iQIYI has become the first Chinese video platform to deploy the open‑source AV1 codec on its PC web and Android apps, cutting video file size by about 20%, and its in‑house QAV1 encoder further reduces bitrate over 40% and runs roughly five times faster than competing encoders, enabling smoother 4K/8K streaming while saving bandwidth.