# AV1 Tutorial — Mile High Video At **[Mile High Video 2026](https://www.mile-high.video/)**, I gave a tutorial on the [AV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1) video codec. The original session was not recorded. To make the material available beyond the room, I later recorded a narrated walkthrough of the slides. <div style="display: flex; justify-content: center;"> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RMVMIo17UZY?si=V4CmGzxr_blbVpuY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> The session was planned as a one-hour tutorial, but extended to nearly two hours due to discussion and questions. Rather than walking through the AV1 specification, the goal was to **build intuition** around the codec’s design. ## Scope and intent AV1 is often presented as a long list of tools and modes. That framing is accurate, but incomplete. This tutorial focuses on: - *why* specific tools exist - *what assumptions* they encode about natural video signals - *how compute is being allocated*, implicitly or explicitly - where AV1 fits in the broader evolution of video compression The emphasis is on **understanding**, not memorization. ## Slides 📄 [Download slides (PDF)]([https://files.trud.ca/.pdf](https://files.trud.ca/AV1Tutorial(MHV26).pdf)) This tutorial reflects my personal perspective and experience working on video compression, and is not an official description of the AV1 specification. ## Selected references The tutorial builds on prior work from the AV1 community, particularly where empirical evaluation and practical constraints help explain *why* certain tools and design choices exist. - **Lei, R. (2019)**. [Coding Efficiency Evaluation of AV1 Coding Tools](RyanLei-2019-AV1CodingToolEvaluation.pdf). Presented at the Alliance for Open Media Research Symposium 2019. This work provides a systematic tool-by-tool analysis of AV1 coding efficiency, and is especially useful for understanding how individual tools contribute, interact, and sometimes overlap in practice. http://downloads.aomedia.org/assets/pdf/symposium-2019/slides/RyanLei-Av1QualityEvaluation.pdf - **Tmar, H. et al. (2024)**. [Benchmarking Hardware and Software Encoder Quality and Performance](HasseneTmar-2024-SVTAV1Benchmark.pdf). In **Applications of Digital Image Processing XLVII** (Proc. SPIE Vol. 13137, 131370W). This paper highlights real-world trade-offs between compression efficiency, performance, and deployment constraints, grounding AV1 design decisions in practical benchmarking data across encoder implementations. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3031754 These documents are not prerequisites for the tutorial, but they provide useful background for readers interested in deeper quantitative or implementation-level perspectives. ## Feedback and discussion If you have questions, disagreements, or follow-up thoughts, feel free to reach out or reference this material in discussion.   Several of the most interesting parts of the session came from audience questions.