that’s it that’s the post.
JK, but seriously though. AV1 is incredible and I NEED support for hardware decoding to accelerate and fast. I just shoved an 18GB Blu-ray movie into 5 gigs with room for improvement. I can get stream worthy 1080p60 video at 6000kbps when I need at least double that if I use x264. Even at a ok encode speed, the 1080 6000kbps video on YouTube looks pretty good all things considered - sure my super high bitrate x264 video looks clearer, but it’s also at least double the file size on my disk.
I could probably real-time CPU encode my streams with AV1. I could definitely do it even better with hardware encoding.
AV1 is black magic. It feels wrong.
Hardware encoding is worse quality than software encoding iirc (per filesize). libaom should be the best quality codec but it encodes the slowest I believe? Idk the last time I checked on AV1 was like a couple years ago and the encoders are always in flux. You can use vmaf for a deterministic scoring system for quality if you don’t want to pixel hunt.