rav1e 0.8.1 2025-07-01
rav1e allows you to encode video files to the AV1 video format, easily and fast.
Check: How do I use rav1e and FFmpeg to create high quality video files? guide.
rav1e is an open-source encoder for the AV1 video format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM).
AV1 is a new, royalty-free video format that is designed to be more efficient and higher-quality than previous video formats, such as VP9 and H.264.
One of the main benefits of AV1 is that it can achieve similar video quality to these other formats at a lower bitrate, which means it can be used to encode video files more efficiently and save on bandwidth costs.
rav1e is still a work in progress, but it is actively being developed with the goal of eventually being able to handle all use cases for AV1 encoding.
Currently, rav1e is most suitable for cases where libaom (the reference encoder for AV1) is too slow.
This is because rav1e has been optimized for speed and is able to encode video files much faster than libaom in many cases.
However, it should be noted that the quality of the encoded video produced by rav1e may not be as good as that produced by libaom in all cases, so it is important to carefully consider which encoder is most suitable for a given use case.
To summarize, some of the main features of rav1e include:
- Support for intra, inter, and switch frames
- Use of 64x64 superblocks and various block sizes for RDO-selected square and rectangular blocks
- Support for various prediction modes and transforms
- Support for different bit depths and chroma sampling formats
- Multiple speed settings with the ability to encode video in near real-time at high speeds
- Support for constant quantizer and target bitrate encoding modes, as well as single- and multi-pass encoding
- Still picture mode for encoding static images
These features make rav1e a powerful and flexible tool for encoding video to the AV1 format.
As GUI (Graphical User Interface), we suggest to use rav1e GUI 1.17 - it allows you to encode your video files to the AV1 video format easily and fast. See more info on developer's page.
- rav1e GUI uses ffmpeg and rav1e. In order to run rav1e GUI correctly, copy ffmpeg.exe and rav1e.exe into rav1e GUI's folder.
- See also this guide: How to play Youtube videos with AV1 codec?
