CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@alatiera Definitely true! But looking at the numbers of seeders/leechers on public torrent trackers, the number of people downloading a 60GB remux vs a 20GB re-encode is tiny in comparison. At least the re-encodes could be done in AV1.

@cameron_bosch It is, but it's closer to H.264 than H.265/HEVC in terms of efficiency and feature support. For 4K video and HDR you really need something beyond what VP9 offers. Plus, even for your standard SDR 1080p content, the filesizes/bitrates are so much smaller for the same quality levels.

Honestly, having AV1 become the default codec of choice for people sharing content illegally would be the #1 way to build momentum there.

That, and making sure that every device we ship from now on includes hardware decoding support, would really help turn the tide I reckon (the latter is mostly happening already, thankfully).

Most of the world has standardized on FLAC, a highly capable and patent-free audio codec, for its hi-res music delivery format of choice.

I wish we could now do the same for video, using AV1.

HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs

HEVC licensing gets more expensive in January.

Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)