In the world of AV1 encoding, achieving high-quality, efficient compression often requires intricate knowledge & fine-tuning of confounding parameters (aom-av1-lavish ... looking at you, wink). This difficulty is compounded by the fact that you are faced with three open-source encoding options that are all compelling for different reasons. This can make tapping into AV1's potential a daunting task for novice and even intermediate users.

That's where rav1ator-cli comes in. I have attempted to distill weeks (months?) of community parameter testing & expertise into an easy-to-use interactive command line interface. With just a few prompts, rav1ator-cli guides you through choosing an encoder & selecting settings to achieve maximum perceptual efficiency at any speed or quality setting you prefer. Adding in the ability to specify custom parameters, rav1ator-cli provides a smooth on-ramp for newcomers while remaining flexible enough for power users.

Here are some of rav1ator-cli's standout features that make it a superb encoding tool: rAV1ator CLI can:

• Check if it is installed & up to date on its own without a package manager
• Download AVX2-optimized encoder binaries compiled with -O3 -flto in most cases & allow the user to install them with detailed instructions
• Encode with x264, x265, aomenc, SVT-AV1, or rav1e & set a speed preset, CRF/quality value, FFmpeg parameters, and encoder parameters
• Use pre-defined encoding parameters that are provided so you can say goodbye to cargo culting
• Generate Av1an encoding commands with the user's chosen settings & run them to encode a provided input video to an MKV output
• Encode from scratch, or resume a previous rav1ator-cli encode
• Engage with rich interactivity featuring spinners, prompts, dropdowns, & other glitz
• Error check downloads by checking hashes on the downloaded binaries for security & convenience

This tool is Linux only. If you'd like to install: These instructions are for Arch Linux specifically, but if you have all the dependencies, you can skip to Step 3 & it'll work on any distro (I'm assuming this includes WSL, too).

0. Update your system before doing anything. On Arch:

sudo pacman -Syu

1. Install yay (Arch only) by running the following commands:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay && makepkg -si

2. Next, you'll want to install all of rav1ator-cli's dependencies. You can do that by running:

yay -Sy rust ffmpeg python mkvtoolnix-cli vapoursynth gum numactl l-smash vapoursynth-plugin-lsmashsource av1an ffms2

3. Install rav1ator-cli:

curl -sOJ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gianni-rosato/rav1ator-cli/main/rav1ator-cli && chmod +x rav1ator-cli
sudo cp rav1ator-cli /usr/local/bin

Thank you for looking at rAV1ator CLI! You can see demos as well as more info on the project at either link below. GitHub | Codec Wiki

Connect with me: https://discord.gg/bbQD5MjDr3