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by Forgeties79 17 days ago
Who is regularly watching uncompressed videos outside of production environments? That’s got to be a very small population.
1 comments

The context was remotely encoding the video, which would require sending the uncompressed stream.
I think the context was intended to be "encoded in some fashion on the upload, just it not as AV2 until after the remote end does all of the transcoded variations". I.e. upload as 2x target bitrate AV1 once and distribute as 1x target bitrate AV2 1,000 times and you'll get the same quality without having to encode AV2 locally.

I've actually done a version this for some multi-system live AV at an event before. Between the main software mixer workstations at various fields in the event it was a dumb but simple encoding they could do in hardware at a high bitrate and then in the machine compositing for the livestream out it did AV1 software encoding to upload to the streaming site to minimize bandwidth requirement from the venue and maximize quality on the streaming site. We've since upgraded to hardware with AV1 encode though.

The practical downside is AV2 is only providing a 30% advantage over AV1. For the streaming providers their bandwidth costs are pretty cheap compared to revamping the transcoding infrastructure, so it'd probably only make financial sense once the remove end can do the most complex and quality encoding used and the rest are all simpler.