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