Pretty much all video game footage on YouTube has painful artifacts, for example. YouTube being free can cut a whole lot of corners. I imagine YouTube is spending far more to encode and store AV1 than they are saving in bandwidth at this point it's not like they can stop encoding and storing the H.264 streams anytime soon. But we're still several years away from having even 50% of PCs having HW AV1 support.Ī ROI justification for AV1 would be very hard to make right now. Obviously trends are going in the right direction, as all the major CPU companies have announced AV1 HW decode support and AV1 quality-at-perf-at-bitrate has improved enormously in the last 12 months. It's utility for premium content is a lot lower for the moment due to lack of HW DRM, broader availability of HEVC, and high quality bar. So, YouTube is pretty much the ideal AV1 platform for the moment, as it targets lower quality SW decode without DRM. But that only works for moderate degrees of grain.

One of the biggest AV1 features that was supposed to save bits versus H.264 and HEVC was its film grain modeling. If one's willing to spend that amount of time to make AV1 look good, one could also do x264 -preset placebo and x265 -preset veryslow. Encoding AV1 at high-quality while at low enough bitrates to justify adding another encoding target is slow. When someone is paying extra to subscribe to or buy UHD or HDR content, expectations go even higher. The general expectation is to not have any distracting artifacts. One people are paying for a service or content, their expectations go way higher. YouTube also has much lower quality expectations than premium content, so they can get away with consistently suboptimal encoding. Premium content also has a smaller usage share of browsers versus apps/TVs/streaming media device.

AV1's gains versus HEVC aren't that big at best, so it's the gains versus H.264 that's the real game changer, and the only material platforms that have AV1 but can't use HEVC are Chrome and Firefox (pretty much all current Android phones have HW HEVC decode, just not from Chrome). Unlike YouTube, Netflix has premium content, much or all of which has DRM requirements. I expect Netflix to follow the trend of AV1 stream availability due to the quality per bandwidth gain. Probably due to the increased availability of hardware decoders.

Macro Recorder 3.0.47 free download