"Set for a year-end release, AV2 is not only an upgrade to the widely adopted AV1 but also a foundational piece of AOMedia’s future tech stack.
AV2, a generation leap in open video coding and the answer to the world’s growing streaming demands, delivers significantly better compression performance than AV1. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. AV2 marks a milestone on the path to an open, innovative future of media experiences."
AV1 was mid. Extremely slow encoding and minor performance gains over H265. And no good encoders on release.
H266 was miles ahead but that is propriatary like 265. So win some lose some.
Compression and efficiency is often a trade-off. H266 is also much slower than AV1, under same conditions. Hopefully there will come more AV1 hw encoders to speed things up… but at least the AV1 decoders are already relatively common.
Also, the gap between h265 and AV1 is higher than between AV1 and h266. So I’d argue it’s the other way around. AV1 is reported to be capable of ~30-50% bitrate savings over h.265 at the cost of speed. H266 differences with AV1 are minor, it’s reported to get a similar range, but more balanced towards the 50% side and at the cost of even lower speed. I’d say once AV1 encoding hardware is more common and the higher presets for AV1 become viable it’d be a good balance for most cases.
The thing is that h26x has a consortium of corporations behind with connections and an interest to ensure they can cash in on their investment, so they get a lot of traction to get hw out.
AV1 only has gains at very low quality settings. For high quality, h265 is much better. At least with the codecs available in ffmpeg, from my tests.
Note that high-quality + low-bitrate AV1 setup often requires using parameters that rise the time and processing power beyond what’s typically sensible in an average setup without hw encoder. And compared with h265 this would be even higher since not only is h265 less complex and faster to begin with, but it also is often hw accelerated.
Here there’s a 2020 paper comparing various encoders for high quality on fullHD: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340351958_MSU_Video_Codec_Comparison_2019_part_IV_High-Quality_Encoding_aom_rav1e_SVT-AV1_SVT-HEVC_SVT-VP9_x264_x265_ENTERPRISE_VERSION
“First place in the quality competition goes to aom [AOMedia’s AV1 encoder], second place goes to SVT-AV1, and third place to x265”
And av1 codecs are younger, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they have improved over the h265 ones since the article.
Here’s the settings they used in aom, for reference:
aomenc.exe --width=%WIDTH% --height=%HEIGHT% --fps=%FPS_NUM%/%FPS_DENOM% --bit-depth=8 --end-usage=vbr --cpu-used=0 --target-bitrate=%BITRATE_KBPS% --ivf --threads=32 --tune=ssim -o %TARGET_FILE% %SOURCE_FILE%I can try it again, but what I did was compare h265 to SVT-AV1 in ffmpeg, using a couple different clips of different styles (including a video from my phone and some ripped blu-ray movies). I used “constant quality / variable bitrate settings, and ran each file with a variety of settings for both encoders. I judged the videos with a quality comparison tool ffmpeg has, and I also took subjective notes when I could tell the difference.
I found AV1 did better at very low quality (when it was firmly into the region where it was visibly different, AV1 did have better quality per bitrate).
But when trying to produce high-quality clips, AV1 was never able to produce a clip that matched the quality score of h265, even when the bitrate of the AV1 file was higher.