# Condor

Canonical URL: https://encode.wiki/tools/utilities/condor/
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> **Repository:** [BoatsMcGee/Av1an](https://github.com/BoatsMcGee/Av1an). Cross-platform command-line AV1 / VP9 / HEVC / H264 encoding framework with per scene quality encoding. Last commit: Oct 8, 2026. License: GPL-3.0. Stars: 1.

Condor ("Project Condor") is a rewrite of [Av1an](/tools/utilities/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](https://github.com/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

Rolling builds of the fork's master are published on its [releases page](https://github.com/BoatsMcGee/Av1an/releases) 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](/tools/utilities/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

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:

```sh
condor --input input.mkv --output output.mkv --params "--preset 4 --crf 30"
condor --input input.mkv --output output.mkv --params "--preset 4" --target 80
```

The 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](https://github.com/BoatsMcGee/Av1an/blob/master/california-condor/docs/guide.md) explains the configuration file.