Aviator
A lightweight, Flatpak-first, easy-to-use GUI utility for encoding with SVT-AV1 & Opus.
About
Aviator enables simple, easy-to-use video encoding for the word's most advanced open video codec, AV1. Encode your favorite media into super efficient files with incredible quality per bit, powered by the SVT-AV1 production encoder with Opus for audio encoding. The sky's the limit for your old home video collection & large 4k smartphone videos, and you can fly in style with a beautiful libadwaita interface. Take off with Aviator!
Aviator is designed to be a no frills, easy to use AV1 encoder that any beginner can pick up and immediately understand how to use.
Installation
Flathub
Aviator is available on Flathub. You can learn how to set up Flatpak on your distro of choice here.
Building from Source
Make sure you have all required dependencies before building from source. This includes flatpak-builder, python3 & gcc
git clone https://github.com/natesales/aviator
cd aviator
makeAny third party packaging formats are not officially supported by Aviator, and if you encounter bugs while using them please do not submit them as issues as we do not officially support third party packaged versions of Aviator.
Why AV1?
AV1 aims to be more efficient than HEVC & VP9 by around 30%, and more efficient than h.264 by 50%. Traditionally, a lot of AV1 encoder implementations have been pretty slow compared to competing codecs' encoders, but the production encoder SVT-AV1 is decently speedy. We decided to use SVT-AV1 in order to give users a scalable and fast AV1 encoder implementation that "just works," for the most part.
Aviator comes bundled with its own version of ffmpeg that is capable of encoding AV1 video using SVT-AV1.
Aviator's Defaults
Hovering over most user configurable options in Aviator will produce a helpful tooltip that you can look at to make options more clear.
By default, when you load a video file some parameters will be set to match the source as closely as possible. These parameters include the resolution, framerate, and audio bitrate. Aviator's SVT-AV1 speed preset is set to 6 by default, with a CQ (Constant Quality) level of 32. You can set a CQ level from 0 to 63 using the slider, with larger numerical values indicating smaller filesize at the expense of visual quality. You can look at the detailed specifications behind each speed preset here. Speed 6 offers a good balance between speed & compression efficiency at any CQ level.
Audio is reencoded even if the bitrate is set to be the same as the source audio. Audio is encoded to Opus, which is a highly efficient free audio codec that is often more efficient than competitors like AAC & MP3 audio. Because of Opus's incredible efficiency, audio tracks will be encoded at 48kbps if no source bitrate is detected. Opus reaches audio transparency at around 128kbps.
Roadmap & Limitations
Currently, Aviator cannot handle:
- Video streams with subtitles
These are considered bugs, and we are working on fixing them ASAP.
In the future, we would like to:
- Add a progress bar
- Add maximize & minimize buttons in the header bar
- Add a "Stop Encode," button
- Add a queue, potentially
- Revamp outputting a file
- Revamp the About page
Let us know if you have any issues in our Issues section. Thank you for using Aviator!
Credits
Actively developed by Nate Sales & Gianni Rosato
