libaom update needed

[Daniel Novomeský]

Hello,

I wrote about a problem with saving AVIF images in
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/comments/qakbk8/unable_to_save_avif_images_in_kubuntu_2110/

The problem is that libavif was build without AV1 encoders, so it can read AVIF images but cannot save them.

The problem was already reported to libavif package:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libavif/+bug/1943658

libaom is one of the AV1 encoders that can be used by libavif.

The root of the problem is that libaom in Ubuntu is very outdated (v1.0.0-errata1 version) and it cannot be used by libavif.

Latest version of libaom is 3.2.0

If you don't want that latest version, you can use one of these:
https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+/refs/tags/v3.1.2
https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+/refs/tags/v2.0.2

or at least
https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+/refs/tags/v1.0.0-errata1-avif

Libaom 1.0 is very-very-very slow to encode videos with AV1 codec. People from encoding community no longer use libaom 1.0 because it is indeed slower than snail.
Performance was significantly improved in libaom 2.0 and even further in 3.x

Libaom 1.0 have some encoders issues which are resolved in newer versions.

Please upgrade libaom to allow faster AV1 video encoding and to enable libavif to save AVIF images.

Thanks,
Daniel

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Veikko Mäkelä (veikk0.ma)]

Just to add some context to the "very-very-very slow" part: using the fastest speed preset, v1.0.0 is 26x slower than v3.2.0. It also uses 3x the RAM. (tested on a 1080p video using a single thread to remove any multi-threading changes from the equation)

Not only that, but v1.0.0's fastest preset is incapable of producing files as efficiently compressed as v3.2.0's fastest preset, so the latest release even has an 11.5% compression efficiency improvement. v1.0.0 also doesn't have a real-time encoding mode, that was added in v2.0.0.

Furthermore, the changelog (https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+/df61427b1bcf6f6beff7d1293895633929af6a76/CHANGELOG) states that v2.0.0 is the "First official release of libaom." How I interpret this is that v1.0.0 was an unoptimized reference codec release, akin to the reference software of other codecs (like the HM of HEVC and VTM for VVC), and v2.0.0 was the first libaom release intended for end-users.

Personally, I consider v1.0.0 impractical for real use cases, and as such an update would be required to make any of the aom packages useful.