[jjcm]

I strongly disagree with it not being required. I run a small social news site - AV1 is still prohibatively expensive both for the server and clients for software encoding/decoding. Without hardware encoding, the tradeoff for better compression ratios in exchange for massive battery use + very long processing times for encoding simply isn't worth it. In order to get AV1 out, I have to often process a h264 version of a video first anyway, just so the client isn't left waiting for their video upload to finish encoding. This means to support AV1 I'm not saving anything on the storage side. Even youtube only does AV1 encodes for extremely popular videos - it only makes sense to do at significant scale.

I love AV1, don't get me wrong, and I can't wait til I can switch over to it as a single unified format for both images and video, but for now the cost is too high until hardware acceleration becomes ubiquitous

[Gigachad]

I went and checked some youtube videos on my front page, A video with 15k views had an AV1 encode, while a video with 160 views was h264 only. So extremely popular videos is not how I would describe it, probably by views, almost everything you watch on youtube is AV1. But they skip the extra encodes for videos relatively no one watches.

[ksec]

Last time I checked they do it for new videos only. Older videos with 1M views aren't even on AV1.

[Gigachad]

Makes sense, new videos are where most of the streams are happening, I wouldn't be surprised if they start to reduce the number of transcodes to save space as a video drops in popularity. h264 will work on everything so they need that as a minimum, with AV1 just being there to save on data transfer.

[ksec]

Thanks You. I have been saying this since the launch of AV1 on HN, Doom9 and other places. I wanted to mention even Google uses custom dedicated hardware ASIC for AV1 encode.

I wish LCEVC is more widespread. For the same H.264 encoding time you get 50% to 60% Bitrate reduction using it with H.264.