AV1 hardware support is great and all, but what streaming services actually support it? Twitch did a pilot back in 2020 and the video quality was fantastic. They still haven't rolled it out.
Possibly worth noting that the encoding speeds for AV1 have improved out of all recognition over the past few years. Depending on what Twitch were using, even back in 2020 it might have been orders of magnitude slower than encoding other relatively modern formats. Today that is no longer true and in some circumstances encoding AV1 seems to be faster than almost anything else since H264. So if hardware decoding is also improving, it’s certainly possible that more services could potentially use AV1 now or in the near future.
(Source for the above is just some personal experiments. I happened to be doing a load of benchmarking with video codecs this weekend, as we’re hoping to start using AV1 for a website I run.)
(Source for the above is just some personal experiments. I happened to be doing a load of benchmarking with video codecs this weekend, as we’re hoping to start using AV1 for a website I run.)