Encoder Complexity Control in SVT-AV1 by Speed-Adaptive Preset Switching

Current developments in video encoding technology lead to continuously improving compression performance but at the expense of increasingly higher computational demands. Regarding the online video traffic increases during the last years and the concomitant need for video encoding, encoder complexity control mechanisms are required to restrict the processing time to a sufficient extent in order to find a reasonable trade-off between performance and complexity. We present a complexity control mechanism in SVT-AV1 by using speed-adaptive preset switching to comply with the remaining time budget. This method enables encoding with a user-defined time constraint within the complete preset range with an average precision of 8.9 % without introducing any additional latencies.