AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) [main thread]

[spoRv]

First post updated; if you spend few minutes reading the newest comparison, you can see that VVC is only marginally better than AV1, while being not only royalty burden, but also without grain synthesis.

Frankly - apart no royalties and grain synthesis - with AV1 adopted by so many big players right now, being quality wise better than HEVC with 30% bitrate saving, and reached more than reasonable encoding time, I don't see the point to wait for VVC!

[stwd4nder2]

I'm curious... what if someone upload an already encoded video in AV1 or VP9? (with proper resolution and bitrate)
Would Youtube leave it untouched? Convert it anyway?

Yup, unless they've changed things a video will be transcoded no matter what you originally upload it in.

[spoRv]

So, I watched further low count videos on Youtube - some with less than 100 views, some uploaded five years ago! - and many were AV1 (also the oldest = they must have been converted later); many 1280x720, some 1920x1080, few 854x480 and one was 426x240; all of them were "related", played on both the PC with Firefox and TV Box that runs Android TV.

[spoRv]

Latest tests:
downloaded the last NotEnoughAV1Encodes 2.0.3 and encoded a prores grainy source, 3840x2160 2.35:1 active frame, 24fps, with 30mbps target bitrate (and 90mbps max bitrate that works only with svt-av1)

• aomenc, no grain synthesis: final bitrate around 40mbps; encoding time 8x real time
  
• svt-av1, grain synthesis: final bitrate around 33mbps; encoding time 3x real time
  

The aomenc is nearer the original source, but it was expected as it uses 25% more bitrate than the target; svt-av1 get near results, retaining most of the original coarse grain but adding a layer or finer grain, at only 10% more bitrate than the target, and almost three times faster.

Few days ago I encoded aomenc with same settings, using different software, and encoding time was 32x real time, so much better now!
About svt-av1; using a different software, without grain synthesis, same +10% bitrate vs target, 5x real time encoding, and virtually no differences with aomenc

So, my (temporary) conclusion is that using svt-av1 is faster, and get pretty much the same result with lower bitrate.

[spoRv]

Okay maybe I'm really stupid but ... any chance you could unite all the AV1 threads? I was trying to find that post where you compared the different grain synthesis of different AV1 encoders and for the life of me, I cannot find it. I have 3 threads open and I'm lost.

You are completely right... here you are!