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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Could you elaborate on the weaknesses of AV1? I hadn't heard that. Is it because of the wavelet-based i-frames that h265 uses? Or a bunch of little things?

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I think he may be referring to AV1's economics weakness. Not the actual quality itself. As in the cost to bring quality to this level while disregarding encoder and decoder complexity. Kostya has a rant about it here [1]. He was the guy that made Real Video work across all platform .

Personally I am giving the industry a benefits of doubt and one last chance on VVC / H.266.

[1] https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-abou...

> As in the cost to bring quality to this level while disregarding encoder and decoder complexity.

AV1 is amazing for YouTube, Netflix and torrent-scale videos currently.

I can't find the reference for this, but in the beginning the codec developers and big companies had meetings. The answer from big companies for how much encode time increase would be acceptable was 100x to 1000x the current standard. Thus the design.

Of course the encode time problem will be solved for regular users too once AV1 encode ASICs for consumer hardware enter the market in 3–5 years. There are a few solutions already offering cloud FPGA encoding alongside beefy servers. If streaming bandwith costs are a significant issue for you, then you can easily afford that.

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