[ray023]

I hope the future is bright with AV1. But even scene groups heavily release in 265 instead of AV1. Hardware support is going to get better over the years and hopefully everyone will just use AV1 and leave this license BS behind.

[ndiddy]

> But even scene groups heavily release in 265 instead of AV1.

I believe this is because scene groups don't really care about patent licensing, and there's around 5-6 years of computers with hardware H.265 decoding and no hardware AV1 decoding. I think we'll see AV1 and successors take over in 5-10 years when it's safer to assume users will have AV1 decoding.

[KronisLV]

> I hope the future is bright with AV1.

I bought an Intel Arc A580 and then later B580 which also has an AV1 hardware encoder, and I have to say that it's really pleasant, good enough for real time streaming, video recording even at lower bitrates (e.g. 1080p30 at ~10 Mbps is okay) and ends up saving a lot of space when compared to both H264 and H265, which previously wasn't viable because the CPU based encoder is painfully slow.

I saved a few hundred GB of space by re-encoding all of my local videos in AV1, I'm guessing it might be have been one of the better cases because most of the videos were anime instead of more detailed video like regular movies, but it worked out nicely for me! Plus, the software support is also quite good: OBS and Handbrake had no issues, neither does VLC seem to have any.

All of that makes me wish it'd become more widespread in the next decade or so, everywhere from YouTube and Twitch to even our phone cameras.

[nisa]

> 1080p30 at ~10 Mbps is okay

FWIW Most Streaming TV Services like Zattoo do 1080p50 using H264 using that Bitrate and while not perfect it's fine - using AV1 one could probably go way below that.

[ksec]

1080p30 at ~10 Mbps isn't a low bitrate unless you are aiming for something very specific. Not to mention there is H.265 hardware encoder inside Intel Arc, although I have no idea about their quality. Nvidia seems to do a much better job in this area.

[KronisLV]

If you record a video game, I find that anything much lower really messes with the visual quality, especially if it portrays a forest scene or something with lots of detail like snow. Admittedly, you have to zoom in to notice and it's more apparent during fast movement, though VBR and other options seem to help.

The H265 encoder is also lovely, from what I've seen! Bigger file sizes, but a bit more software support in some places.

[justaj]

I'll continue to use h264 because it has hardware acceleration on my Thinkpad X220, whereas x265 doesn't enjoy the same luxuries on this laptop.

[aftbit]

It might be time to consider some new hardware. That machine is going on 15 years old now!

[i80and]

To be honest, if a 15 year old machine is still working fine for somebody, and h.264 is fine (if you don't care about HDR/4k, it really sort of is!), I'm not sure the benefit of suggesting somebody junk a machine

[justaj]

I have considered, but so far there's no other hardware which has this form-factor with Libreboot support (although I'm unsure whether the X230 has x265 hw accel)

[Thaxll]

AV1 is extremely slow to encode last time I tried.

[i80and]

My guess is you were using the reference AOM encoder. This is actually a real branding problem! It was never designed for encoding speed, and it shows.

SVT-AV1 is the production encoder you should be using. It's high quality and fast in software, and should really always be the default.

[ksec]

It is not a branding problem. Only in recent few years has SVT caught up to AOM in terms of encoding quality.

Using SVT for encoding in the early days is basically trading quality for speed.

[spongebobstoes]

For now most of the focus has been on the slow encodes, but in theory it can match h264 for speed and quality on encoding. In practice I've seen it get very close already.

[ksec]

Because scene groups are still done by enthusiast that actually cares about encoding quality rather than patents licensing.

[out_of_protocol]

vp9 is widely used (e.g. YouTube is mostly vp9, av1 and fallback h264) and not much worse

[alabastervlog]

I avoid AV1 sources for anything I care about, because of film grain synthesis.

[p1mrx]

Does AV1 just emulate the film grain from the source video, or are people adding/customizing the grain when encoding?

[alabastervlog]

Emulates it, which strikes me as extremely silly. The original grain is in the film itself, it's part of it, it's what the image is made of. Fake grain is just noise. Either denoise it or keep the real grain, I have no interest in fake grain.

[Dylan16807]

Can't you turn it off in the player and get the denoised version?

[alabastervlog]

Probably? Though I don't think those kinds of controls are exposed in most of the players I use (usually set-top box video players). Besides, if I'm dealing with a 20 to 80GB 4k copy of something that originally had grain, I prefer it still be present—if I'm dedicating that kind of space, the point is fidelity. If I'm dealing with something smaller than about 8GB 1080p, I probably don't really care what it looks like aside from preferably not having obvious artifacting, so I guess AV1 would be OK in that case, though all else being equal I'll still pick h265 just to avoid the fake-grain concern entirely.

[Latty]

Why? It's a feature you have to explicitly turn on when encoding, and I've not seen people using it for most stuff.

[alabastervlog]

I can't know if it was used in advance, so favor h265. Which is far more common (and so's h264) so it's not much trouble to avoid AV1.

[msanlop]

including digital footage with film grain added in post?

[alabastervlog]

I don't watch a ton of films with noticeable fake grain. Even the ones that do fake it, it's barely perceptible, so I wouldn't care on those—not many of them are emulating the huge, obvious grain of high-sensitivity '60s and '70s film, for instance. A lot of what I watch is from the '90s or earlier, so the grain's real.