[zenoprax]

If you're approaching it from a "semantic pixel peeping" perspective then yes, I understand what you mean. It's a pretty clean bite... but it's important to remember the context in which most images will be assessed.

Earlier this week I did some A/B testing with AV1 and HEVC video encoding. For similar bit rates there was a difference but I had to know what to look for and needed to rapidly cycle between a single frame from both files and even then... barely. The difference disappeared when I hit play and that's after knowing what to look for.

For anyone curious: if you are targeting 5-10 Mbps from a Bluray source AV1 will end up slightly smaller (5-10%) with slightly more retention of film grain in darker areas. Target 10 Mbps with a generous buffer (25 MB) and a max bit rate (25 Mbps) and you'll get really efficient bit rates in dark scenes and build up a reserve of bandwidth for confetti-like situations. The future is bright for hardware video encoding/decoding with royalty-free codecs. Conclusion: prefer AV1 for 5-10 Mbps but it's no big deal if it's not an option.