Hey, this is a note from Gianni, the former lead maintainer of this project.

I posted a blog post about this in November of 2024, but on April 20th 2025 I can officially announce the actual end of SVT-AV1-PSY.

I stepped away from SVT-AV1-PSY in December of 2024. Our other amazing team member Julio also left shortly afterwards, and a third awesome team member Clybius began to roll back his efforts as well.

This left BlueSwordM as the solo maintainer & lead developer on this project. Since December, the pace of progress has understandably changed.

While efforts to merge SVT-AV1-PSY features to mainline SVT-AV1 have been ongoing for a while, we want to begin emphasizing this as our sole mission from this point forward. While I am still not personally going to be heavily involved, I believe this is the direction in which BlueSwordM is heading and I fully support this decision.

If you would like to use our features moving forward, the best versions of our important changes have been and will continue to be making their way over to mainline SVT-AV1. I'll provide a link to the project here: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/

In the meantime, BlueSwordM will be keeping up a fork of this project in its current state to address bugs and other more immediate issues. It is up to him where he wants that project to go. I'll link Blue's GitHub here for visibility as well: https://github.com/BlueSwordM/svt-av1-psyex

One exciting tidbit to add is that through Aviator alone, SVT-AV1-PSY has been downloaded over 10,000 times. For something I didn't really intend to be more than a hobby project, that's pretty cool! Our Tune 4 changes have also been merged to libaom in the form of Tune IQ, and through tools like StaxRip, I'm sure countless others have downloaded and used (and hopefully also enjoyed) SVT-AV1-PSY.

If you'd like to see other projects from the Psychovisual Experts Group, check out our video benchmarking toolkit called metrics: https://github.com/psy-ex/metrics

If you're interested in the world of codecs, the Codec Wiki is a really nice resource as well.

Massive thank-you's go out to:

• Julio, our former lead developer and incredible video talent
• BlueSwordM, for carrying the torch and keeping up this project solo for quite a long time
• Clybius, for authoring some of our coolest features (especially Tune 3)
• The diligent researchers in the Community Builds Threads who have worked so hard at building the best binaries
• The encoding community as a whole, for being excited about SVT-AV1-PSY and more importantly AV1

That's all from me – hope to see you all around! Keep on encoding!