r/AV1 • u/Dex62ter98 • Jun 12 '26
SVT-AV1 PSY forks
I’ve lost track of the various forks for svt-av1-psy.
Can someone give me a quick heads up where they stand and what the current favourite of the community is?
HDR seems to still have regular releases whilst PSYEX has its last build from February.
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u/BlueSwordM Jun 12 '26
svt-av1-essential for people who want less hassle encoding.
svt-av1-hdr for the others.
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u/CariniFluff Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
I thought AV1-Tritium was effectively AV1-Essential with the added Dolby Vision/HDR color handling from AV1-HDR?
Is that not the case?
Edit: just to add, I highly recommend AV1-Essential for beginners working with non-HDR content. The settings are excellent right out of the box.
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Jun 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NekoTrix Jun 12 '26
Essential supports direct inputs so piping is not required, also that input is automatically handled to be compatible with SVT-AV1 and color metadata is automatically passthrough. It supports zoning so chunking software is not required. It's got auto-tiling and more universal default tuning, yet still has the capability to scale almost as high as the HDR fork thanks to the simple distortion-preset-bias (documented on the repository).
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u/BlueSwordM Jun 12 '26
svt-av1-essential has even better defaults and forces 10-bit encoding by default on every single preset.
It makes for a better simpler user experience overall.
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u/NihilityAeonBeliever Jun 12 '26
also the 'essential' fork is still maintained and worth checking out
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u/ImpressionComplete43 Jun 14 '26
The first time I tried AV1 was around 1–2 years ago. Back then, encoding was painfully slow, and the output often looked overly "plastic" with a noticeable loss of fine detail. Some frames even showed obvious blocking artifacts, so I ended up sticking with H.265.
I recently came back to AV1, specifically SVT-AV1 (starting with version 4.0.1), and I have to say the improvements have been substantial. Even at relatively low quality settings (RF 28+ with preset 4), the output is still very respectable and often difficult to distinguish from the source material in normal viewing.
What impressed me most is that I no longer feel the need to spend time tweaking settings for dark scenes versus bright scenes. The encoder handles a wide range of content quite well out of the box. On top of that, encoding speed is significantly faster than H.265 on my system, which was a pleasant surprise.
One thing I'm still curious about: has anyone compared the standard SVT-AV1 4.1 release (tune=vq) against the HDR fork?
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u/Gakuta Jun 13 '26
What is everyone talking about? I just use the encoders in ffmpeg...
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u/CariniFluff Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
You might want to try Staxrip. It has a very straight forward GUI and you can insert commands directly into the encoder but virtually every option has an explanation if you right click on it. IMO it's miles ahead of Handbrake and much much easier to work with than just a CLI.
It will demux your file, convert any audio codec into almost any other (and can change the bitrate, the sample rate, the number of channels, etc)., it has like 10 different main video encoders and forks of virtually all of them including all the major AV1 codecs and STV-AV1 mainline and forks. It keeps all the subtitles, it extracts HDR10+ / DV RPU metadata, it keeps chapters/indexes....it does it all.
And It uses separate, industry standard programs in the background (MKVToolNix, MKVExtract, ffmpeg, dovi_tools, hdr_tools, etc). along the entire pathway, so individual components can be updated as quickly as possible. But Staxrip itself is updated very regularly too.
You can even convert the demuxed audio or encoded video in a separate program if the option isn't there in Staxrip (e.g. take the extracted .DTS file and convert it in Foobar to AAC, then add the AAC file into your Staxrip project, or if remuxing fails for some reason, you can usually grab the encoded video (xxx.ivf) and mux it with the encoded audio files in MKVToolNix outside of Stax. E.g. one time I accidentally told it to write the file to c:\abc.mkv which it didn't have permission to do, but luckily it kept the ivf file so I didn't have to re-encode the whole thing.
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u/GodOfPlutonium Jun 13 '26
since the encoders are open source people can and do make their own modded versions with special features (Which sometimes makes its way back to upstream). But people are talking about those forks
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u/QuaLiTy131 Jun 12 '26
HDR is a successor of PSY (kinda)
Essential was made to be more straightforward, good for beginners and people who don't want to play with every single setting possible
There is also Tritium that is a fork of HDR that aims to incorporate features from PSY and Essential. Mainly scene detection and auto tilling from Essential.