Programming Saturday: rav1e GUI

Programming Saturday: rav1e GUI

Hi everyone,

Today, I spent the afternoon programming my rav1e GUI software. It’s been about a month since I last released a rav1e GUI update, and rav1e itself has improved by then.

While I still haven’t released a new GUI version, I did some programming to it to add some of the new rav1e features. Unfortunately, the tests were not successful and I believe this has to do to some changed in the encoder itself. Don’t worry, I’ve opened an issue and I hope to hear back. If this bug is fixed in the encoder, I’ll release the new rav1e GUI version 😁.

The issue I opened

Now, let’s talk about the new GUI features:

rav1e GUI not-yet-released v1.9 screenshot

First, I placed the temporary folder location below the Output video path. I did this to have the text boxes easily accessible and to allow the path to be easily set.

Second, you can see that I moved the quantizer setting and also added a bitrate setting along with 2 radio buttons that allow you to switch between quality control modes. When the Quantizer radio button is checked, the Bitrate text box will get greyed and you can only specify the quantizer value. When the Bitrate radio button is checked, the quantizer value is greyed out and the bitrate textbox is enabled, allowing you to specify the video bitrate in kilobits/second (kb/s or kbps).

Third, I added a 2-Pass option which at the moment does nothing. rav1e added this option but as far as I know, it’s not yet actually implemented. Testing the encoder using its limit function didn’t showed extended encoding times.

Finally, I renamed the “Advanced Encoder Options” button to just “Advanced Options”. It was redundant as it was placed in the Encoder Options group box.

When we press the Advanced Options button, we get shown some more parameters:

Advanced Options

There, I added 2 new arguments that rav1e now accepts:

  • Content Light
  • Range

Also, due to some default arguments that rav1e changed, I also did some default option changes in the GUI.

  1. Low Latency is now disabled by default.
  2. Quality Tuning is now set to Psychovisual (In the above image, I manually changed it back to Psnr).

And with that, I conclude this post. The above changed will be released soon, when rav1e starts working again and I can fully test them. I’ll let you all know when I release it. In the meantime, you can go to the rav1e GUI repo and try running the latest source code.

See ya soon!