I implemented an encoding pipeline for AV1 for vids uploaded to my social news site (think reddit competitor except I'm extremely small fry). I eventually removed the code for it.
While the space savings and quality improvements are good, the encoding speed is an order of magnitude slower than using h264/vp9. In the end the user experience of causing people to wait significantly longer for an AV1 encode wasn't worth the tradeoff. To fix the user experience problem, I still had to encode a h264 version anyway, which kinda defeats the point when it comes to space savings. You still get data transfer improvements, but the break even point for when the encoding costs offset the data transfer costs were around 1000 views per min of video encoded, and as an average I'm far below that.
IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.
Worth keeping in mind I was looking at this ~2 years ago, so things may have evolved since then.
>IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.
But how can they do that without storing the original uploaded video until it hits that view count?
Do they actually store the original uploaded video somewhere, but reencode for the edge servers to save data/storage?
> Do they actually store the original uploaded video somewhere, but reencode for the edge servers to save data/storage?
YouTube has always stored the original video indefinitely. When they added 60FPS support, videos going back years were suddenly available with 60FPS without having to re-upload them. Not many people bothered to upload in 60FPS before YouTube supported it, but those that did noticed. (I know from Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter, which did 60FPS before YouTube supported it possibly because they also had their own platform in parallel.)
AV1 is really one of those things born out of internet providers (e.g. Google, Amazon) put together so they can deliver content more efficiently with their bandwidth without needing to deal with a complicated web of royalties in addition to paying said royalties. There's plenty of people using AV1 or it's image format but don't realize it.
Also, video encoding pretty much always comes with the tradeoff of more efficient = uses more processing power
I did some testing with the 3 main AV1 encoders with gifs (avif). They’re pretty good. But not as good as jpeg xl but currently basically only Safari supports it.
For most “normie” use cases, I’d recommend cloudflares image transforms which are available on free tier. I actually wrote a small Jekyll plugin for my site to auto prefix images with their transform. Idk why but shipping optimized images is just one of those things that tickles me!
In my experience (not professional, encoding various files for archiving or sharing), AV1 perform quite well for low bitrate situation/streaming, and the encoder is reasonably fast (not as fast as h264 ofc, but that's decades of work on it).
But for higher quality encoding, I personally found that h265/HVEC almost always beat it, with similar encoding time.
As for AV2, I just hope that we get a good open-source encoder.
