Is AV1 the ultimate codec?

[Fantastic-Schedule92]

Its open-source, its really efficient and can be direct-played on almost anything, is there any reason to use anything else, are there any downsides?

[nyanmisaka]

Its only drawback is that it is not widespread enough, as it only has hardware acceleration on the latest GPU (Intel Xe, 2020) and SoC (Snapdragon 8 Gen2, 2022; Apple A17 Pro, 2023) chips. But its main competitor, HEVC, is generally available on post-2016 devices.

JF 10.9 already supports transcoding to AV1 using software and hardware, and the only client currently available is browser/web. You can give it a try.

[bitmap]

In my experience, the encoders are one of two things: very slow if you're looking for high quality or extending immature and lacking features/support. For example, most of the rate control features for Intel's QuickSync AV1 encoder are broken -- the only one that works is bit rate, forcing two-pass encodes for decent quality + faster encoding. Bare bones, the QSV encoder will wipe out detail when let loose on something without proper restraint. But it's easy to use.

SVT-AV1 doesn't have all the flexibility of the reference encoder, but it's faster and WAY less complex. Tools like av1an and ab-av1 can help with parallelism (and quality) when using the slower encoders, but have a fairly large learning curve as well. With older content, you NEED film grain synthesis or the encodes come out looking odd, lots of artifacts, etc. The problem is that adding grain without denoising, which creates the best visual quality with old content, almost entirely gobbles up any bit rate savings in comparison with HEVC.

So...at the moment? Yeah, a lack of mature, accessible encoding support would be why not to use it. Otherwise, it's pretty amazing. I've had to manage my expectations after watching (and encoding) hundreds of hours of content, as it's not a miracle, but I'm pretty amazed at what it can accomplish, particularly with newer content that doesn't require much/any grain.