Former Intel Open-Source Project SVT-VP9 Sees First Update In 5 Years
The open-source SVT-VP9 project started by Intel as a high performance VP9 video encoder has seen its first new release in five years.
Coming as much surprise today is the release of SVT-VP9 v0.3.1, the first update to this former Intel open-source project since t he v0.3.0 release back in October 2020. The SVT-VP9 encoder was part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative under their Open Visual Cloud umbrella. SVT-VP9 was developed alongside the SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 that they then discontinued the project last year and the most notable SVT-AV1. With SVT-AV1 it ultimately got punted off to the Alliance for Open Media organization and continues seeing new open-source contributions from different companies and is continuing along healthy. Since Intel stopped maintaining SVT-VP9 there hasn't been much to report especially with having laid off many of the developers involved.
Christopher Degawa who was part of the Intel Visual Cloud software team for three years left the company in 2023 and since then has been contributing to Alliance for Open Media and VideoLAN. Degawa was the one that today ended up releasing SVT-VP9 v0.3.1.
This release though is largely a bug-fix release with fixing some build issues on newer compilers, FFmpeg integration updates, and other fixes.
This release appears mostly motivated for maintenance purposes with no apparent resurgence of SVT-VP9 development: the v0.3.1 Git tag was the first commit since August and only a handful of commits this year or even for the past few years besides these bug fixes. At least it's not completely dead with SVT-VP9 still being one of the higher-performing VP9 CPU-based video encoders.
Downloads and more details on the SVT-VP9 v0.3.1 release via GitHub.
Coming as much surprise today is the release of SVT-VP9 v0.3.1, the first update to this former Intel open-source project since t he v0.3.0 release back in October 2020. The SVT-VP9 encoder was part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative under their Open Visual Cloud umbrella. SVT-VP9 was developed alongside the SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 that they then discontinued the project last year and the most notable SVT-AV1. With SVT-AV1 it ultimately got punted off to the Alliance for Open Media organization and continues seeing new open-source contributions from different companies and is continuing along healthy. Since Intel stopped maintaining SVT-VP9 there hasn't been much to report especially with having laid off many of the developers involved.
Christopher Degawa who was part of the Intel Visual Cloud software team for three years left the company in 2023 and since then has been contributing to Alliance for Open Media and VideoLAN. Degawa was the one that today ended up releasing SVT-VP9 v0.3.1.
This release though is largely a bug-fix release with fixing some build issues on newer compilers, FFmpeg integration updates, and other fixes.
This release appears mostly motivated for maintenance purposes with no apparent resurgence of SVT-VP9 development: the v0.3.1 Git tag was the first commit since August and only a handful of commits this year or even for the past few years besides these bug fixes. At least it's not completely dead with SVT-VP9 still being one of the higher-performing VP9 CPU-based video encoders.
Downloads and more details on the SVT-VP9 v0.3.1 release via GitHub.