Preset not taken into account on av1 transcoding

[stylobille]

The bug

Hello,

I tried today to re-encode my library to reclaim some space and choose av1, I was going for preset 2 which should be "slower" in the interface. I took CRF 25 to have a really good quality and ordered a global re-encoding.

But, when I check the running process I saw :

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -i /photos-nas/2009-10 - Weekend Etretat/00008.MTS -y -c:v libsvtav1 -c:a aac -movflags faststart -fps_mode passthrough -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -v verbose -preset 5 -crf 25 upload/encoded-video/4aed2771-5c66-472f-a9ac-5ce3a7070946/63/48/634836c4-9c64-4a0d-8943-088d3c253d48.mp4

So apparently the "slower" is not taken into account and it goes instead with a -preset 5 which should be the parameter "faster" in the interface.

The OS that Immich Server is running on

RHEL9

Version of Immich Server

1.122.1

Version of Immich Mobile App

1.122.0

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

#
# WARNING: Make sure to use the docker-compose.yml of the current release:
#
# https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
#
# The compose file on main may not be compatible with the latest release.
#

name: immich

services:
  immich-server:
    container_name: immich_server
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    # extends:
    #   file: hwaccel.transcoding.yml
    #   service: cpu # set to one of [nvenc, quicksync, rkmpp, vaapi, vaapi-wsl] for accelerated transcoding
    volumes:
      # Do not edit the next line. If you want to change the media storage location on your system, edit the value of UPLOAD_LOCATION in the .env file
      - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
      - /photos-nas:/photos-nas:ro
      - /photos-emilie:/photos-emilie:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - 2283:2283
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - database
    restart: always
    healthcheck:
      disable: false

  immich-machine-learning:
    container_name: immich_machine_learning
    # For hardware acceleration, add one of -[armnn, cuda, openvino] to the image tag.
    # Example tag: ${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}-cuda
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    # extends: # uncomment this section for hardware acceleration - see https://immich.app/docs/features/ml-hardware-acceleration
    #   file: hwaccel.ml.yml
    #   service: cpu # set to one of [armnn, cuda, openvino, openvino-wsl] for accelerated inference - use the `-wsl` version for WSL2 where applicable
    volumes:
      - model-cache:/cache
    env_file:
      - .env
    restart: always
    healthcheck:
      disable: false

  redis:
    container_name: immich_redis
    image: docker.io/redis:6.2-alpine@sha256:2d1463258f2764328496376f5d965f20c6a67f66ea2b06dc42af351f75248792
    healthcheck:
      test: redis-cli ping || exit 1
    restart: always

  database:
    container_name: immich_postgres
    image: docker.io/tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg14-v0.2.1@sha256:90724186f0a3517cf6914295b5ab410db9ce23190a2d9d0b9dd6463e3fa298f0
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USERNAME}
      POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_DATABASE_NAME}
      POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: '--data-checksums'
    volumes:
      # Do not edit the next line. If you want to change the database storage location on your system, edit the value of DB_DATA_LOCATION in the .env file
      - ${DB_DATA_LOCATION}:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: pg_isready --dbname='${DB_DATABASE_NAME}' --username='${DB_USERNAME}' || exit 1; Chksum="$$(psql --dbname='${DB_DATABASE_NAME}' --username='${DB_USERNAME}' --tuples-only --no-align --command='SELECT COALESCE(SUM(checksum_failures), 0) FROM pg_stat_database')"; echo "checksum failure count is $$Chksum"; [ "$$Chksum" = '0' ] || exit 1
      interval: 5m
      start_interval: 30s
      start_period: 5m
    command: ["postgres", "-c", "shared_preload_libraries=vectors.so", "-c", 'search_path="$$user", public, vectors', "-c", "logging_collector=on", "-c", "max_wal_size=2GB", "-c", "shared_buffers=512MB", "-c", "wal_compression=on"]
    restart: always

volumes:
  model-cache:

Your .env content

# You can find documentation for all the supported env variables at https://immich.app/docs/install/environment-variables

# The location where your uploaded files are stored
UPLOAD_LOCATION=/var/upload
# The location where your database files are stored
DB_DATA_LOCATION=/var/lib/data

# To set a timezone, uncomment the next line and change Etc/UTC to a TZ identifier from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones#List
# TZ=Etc/UTC

# The Immich version to use. You can pin this to a specific version like "v1.71.0"
IMMICH_VERSION=release

# Connection secret for postgres. You should change it to a random password
# Please use only the characters `A-Za-z0-9`, without special characters or spaces
DB_PASSWORD=postgres

# The values below this line do not need to be changed
###################################################################################
DB_USERNAME=postgres
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich

Reproduction steps

1. change encoding parameter to av1 + slower and CRF 25
2. re-encode your library
3. check process parameters detail
   ...

Relevant log output

No response

Additional information

No response

[mertalev]

Immich exposes presets 4-12, mapping them to the preset naming of H.264 and HEVC.

[stylobille]

Hello, so if I'm understanding correctly what you are saying, the only available preset for av1 in immich goes from 4 to 12 and currently they are not mapped with the veryslow-ultrafast list (or maybe veryslow is mapped to 4 and we miss preset 1 to 3) ?

If so, since the veryslow-ultrafast list contains 9 entries and since av1 goes from preset 1 to 13 (if I'm not mistaken), we might miss some fine-tuning here.

I would be ok with a dedicated preset field for av1 that goes from 1 to 13 in order to keep everything accurate (but this adds a field in the interface, which you maybe don't want).

By the way I found the list of what every preset level does here : https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/CommonQuestions.md#what-presets-do (in case someone wonders what this is about) and it's quite technical.

[mertalev]

or maybe veryslow is mapped to 4 and we miss preset 1 to 3

This is correct. I'd prefer to not add different settings here to keep the interface more consistent and intuitive.

If I might ask, why are you interested in using 2? My understanding is that settings below 4 are rarely used because they increase transcoding time drastically for a comparatively small difference in the result. I can be convinced to include them somehow, but I'd like to understand the use-case for this and see some comparisons to 4.

[stylobille]

Ok thanks for confirming, well I was planning to use 2 because I have plenty of time to re-encode my 100GB of video (but not much remaining space on my devices, so the lower the beter).
And yes, from what I read preset 4 is kind of a sweet spot between all the av1 presets (and that should be fine enough for me).
That being said, my opinion is if the option exists, then give the ability to the user to use it, preventing the use of preset 1 to 3 because we want preset 1-13 to match a list of 9 names doesn't seem like a good reason :)