AV1R

'AV1' Video Encoding for Biological Microscopy Data

Converts legacy microscopy video formats (H.264/H.265, AVI/MJPEG, TIFF stacks) to the modern 'AV1' codec with minimal quality loss. Typical use cases include compressing large TIFF stacks from confocal microscopy and time-lapse experiments from hundreds of gigabytes to manageable sizes, re-encoding MP4 files exported from 'CellProfiler', 'ImageJ'/'Fiji', and microscope software with approximately 2x better compression at the same visual quality, and converting legacy AVI (MJPEG) and H.265 recordings to a single patent-free format suited for long-term archival. Automatically selects the best available backend: GPU hardware acceleration via 'Vulkan' 'VK_KHR_VIDEO_ENCODE_AV1' or 'VAAPI' (tested on AMD RDNA4; bundled headers, builds with any 'Vulkan' SDK >= 1.3.275), with automatic fallback to CPU encoding through 'FFmpeg' and 'SVT-AV1'. User controls quality via a single CRF parameter; each backend adapts automatically (CPU and Vulkan use CRF directly, VAAPI targets 55 percent of input bitrate). TIFF stacks use near-lossless CRF 5 by default, with optional proportional scaling via tiff_scale (multiplier or bounding box, aspect ratio always preserved). Small frames are automatically scaled up to meet hardware encoder minimums. Audio tracks are preserved automatically. Provides a simple R API for batch conversion of entire experiment folders.

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