>What I’m more excited about is AV1. AV1 is a next gen codec with members from many tech giants (Apple, Google, MS, etc.) to create a royalty free codec. IIRC some of its baseline is based on VP10, which Google scrapped and had its code donated to developing AV1. Unfortunately the reference encoder libaom is in a very early stage and takes forever to encode. SVT-AV1 is Intel’s (and joined by Netflix) scalable implementation. It performs not as well as libaom, but quality is still better than x265 (SSIM), and encode times are way more reasonable. For now, they look promising, and I am excited to see results in a few years. HEVC took 3-4 years before it was more widely accepted by Anime encoders, and took 5 years until 2018 before I began experimenting with it. AV1 began major development in mid-2018 so by that logic we got 2-3 more years to go.

Well, it's 2021 now, would be interesting to see a guide for AV1 encoding in the same vein. As I understand it, both of the leading AV1 encoders are still undergoing frequent changes and improvements, but it still would be nice to have a guide to help one to get a handle on things.