nmkoder VS vmaf

What you want is vmaf. ffmpeg let's you calculate a vmaf score for any video you'd like, if you want a gui to do this a bit more comfortably, i have used nmkoder in the past

Adding link to our friend /u/nmkd from this parish. https://github.com/n00mkrad/nmkoder.

If you really want to try encoding directly with the encoders(which will allow you to update them separately), there is nmkoder: https://github.com/n00mkrad/nmkoder/releases

workaround: i used nmkoder to transcode the audio to AAC 256 (left video alone), and the resultant file direct played just fine. i think this should prove that the error i get above is bogus(?)

Handbrake has AV1 options in the nightly releases. There are lots of encoders that wrap FFmpeg into a GUI such as Fastflix, nmkoder, qencoder, or Not Enough AV1 Encoders.

I have used this in the past https://github.com/n00mkrad/nmkoder

Netflix did VMAF for this: https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf

It checks a reference video against an encoded video and returns a score representing how close the encoded video appears to the original from a human perspective.

Not sure this is the right sub but I'm going to encode my entire BluRay collection in AV1 / NVEC. I'd like to optimize settings with VMAF but would like an ubuntu/debian based GUI to work with.

VMAF for anybody that doesn't know quantifies the quality difference between a source and modified video.

Netflix even has a method to measure perceivable quality difference. A little while ago I used this tool to calculate this.

Well you can use something like https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo to look at the files and https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf to see if there is no loss.

Vmaf exists

You can try some tests https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf

You can try VMAF as well (which ffmpeg supports). It's normally recommended to make a lossless copy first as a baseline too