Condor
Cross-platform command-line AV1 / VP9 / HEVC / H264 encoding framework with per scene quality encoding
Condor (“Project Condor”) is a rewrite of Av1an split into a Rust library, Andean Condor, and a command-line tool with a terminal UI, California Condor (condor). It keeps Av1an’s scene-based parallel encoding and adds a pipeline of separate steps: scene detection (including a TransNetV2 neural-network detector), noise detection to scale photon-noise grain per scene, a worker-count benchmark, per-scene target quality with SSIMULACRA2, Butteraugli, XPSNR, CVVDP or VMAF, per-scene speed selection, encoding, concatenation and a final quality check. Besides Av1an’s encoders it supports VVenC, the AV2 research encoder avmenc, and FFmpeg.
It is under active development and unreleased: builds identify themselves as 0.0.1-unstable, and the upstream condor branch in rust-av/Av1an lags the BoatsMcGee/Av1an fork where work happens. Use it if you want to try the new pipeline; use Av1an for jobs you need to repeat reliably.
Get it
Section titled “Get it”Rolling builds of the fork’s master are published on its releases page as condor-windows-x64.zip and condor-linux-x64.zip (x86-64 only), plus the Docker image boatsmcgee/condor:latest. Extract the archive with its folder layout intact: the VMAF and TransNetV2 models must stay in the model directory beside the executable. The Linux build needs the system’s FFMS2 library (libffms2). Encoders, FFmpeg and mkvmerge must be in PATH. VMAF and Vship (GPU SSIMULACRA2, Butteraugli and CVVDP) are bundled; XPSNR needs the vszip VapourSynth plugin.
The README also mentions pacman -S condor and cargo install condor; neither package exists yet.
Use it
Section titled “Use it”Running condor with input and output runs the whole pipeline and saves the settings to condor.json in the current directory, so a later run can resume or repeat individual steps:
condor --input input.mkv --output output.mkv --params "--preset 4 --crf 30"condor --input input.mkv --output output.mkv --params "--preset 4" --target 80The encoder defaults to SVT-AV1 (--encoder selects another) and the target metric to SSIMULACRA2.
Each step is also a subcommand (detect-scenes, benchmark, target-quality, encode, concatenate, quality-check and others). condor --help and condor <command> --help list the options; the California Condor guide explains the configuration file.