I've amassed a sizeable hoard, nearly all encoded h264 or h265.
The space savings made by AV1 are attractive, but I don't want to move on it until after I've acquired hardware capable of AV1 GPU accelerated decode.
Even then, the cost of reacquiring some works has to be weighed. Storage space gets freed; but how often do I actually revisit some cherished items?
Anybody else having to make similar evaluations?
The difference between H.265 and AV1 at the same bitrate (assuming both files were encoded with a good encoder) usually isn't huge.
AV1 is great, but the "hype" surrounding it is mostly comparing it to lowish-bitrate H.264 (live) streams.
Totally agree. This reflects my experience encoding with both formats for releases.
At similar bitrate, av1 also performs much much worse on grain and it is slower to encode
Maybe I have a different point of view here, but I have actively converted all my TV series to AV1 and will probably to the same to most of my movies.
The space saving is huge, and the quality is identical to my eyes and hardware. True that storage is cheaper than ever, but this is not a reason valid to waste it anyway.
I have only 6TB of storage for my media and the power needed to run additional disks would only be waste on the long run, and so buying new bogger disks would be a waste for stuff I don't wantch often (more like hoarding than...).
So AV1 is the way. Software encoding is the best quality, I have heard, rather than hardware encoding. As for playback, I have a fire stick with AV1 support that works flawlessly, so.
Edit: I have FV at home, so converting to AV1 during daylight is actually free for me.
I plan to keep using my current 2015-ish phone to watch my media at home, so it's likely I'll keep off of AV1 until phones are made somehow hardware upgradable (Fairphone?). Plus, in a general sense, in order to reacquire new media in a better codec you have to at least keep the old media around until you have finished verifying the new, otherwise you run the risk of ending up with no good copy.
If we don't own digital purchases on purchase, as they can remove titles if they want to, then downloading is not owning/stealing. 😛
Downloading has never been stealing to be fair, that has always been emotive framing for copyright supporting propaganda.
