Optimizing AV1 Encoder for Real-Time Communication.

AV1 compression technology achieved superb efficiency over HEVC and VP9 by introducing advanced compression tools. With these new tools comes increased encoding complexity. On the other hand, real-time communication (RTC) applications require an encoder to operate with low latency, low bitrate, low encode time and often on low-end platforms. This makes usage of AV1 encoder in RTC tasks challenging. In this paper we discuss some of the techniques we used to make libaom AV1 encoder suitable for RTC applications: from encoding tool selection to reducing complexity of the existing encoding tools. By implementing these algorithms among others libaom AV1 encoder is now able to provide low-latency real-time video encoding even on low-end mobile platforms in RTC applications.