Performance of AV1 Real-Time Mode

With COVID-19, the interest for digital interaction has raised, putting in turn real-time or low-latency codecs into a new light. Most of the codec ecosystem, including AV1, has been focusing on coding efficiency which is the main sought after improvement for Video On Demand use case. Very little literature exist on real-time codecs. This work focuses on explaining the differences between the VOD and the interactive use cases from the codec point of view. It makes the difference between latency and throughput, and show that reducing the former to achieve interactive latency is orthogonal to achieving maximum coding efficiency. Measurements are made on encoding of Full HD video sequences from the literature to compare %1/ the speed of AV1 real-time and default AV1, 2/ the respective performances of H.264, VP8, VP9 and AV1 all in real-time mode.