[unlord]

What you are referring to is the encoding time using the libaom reference encoder, which was developed as a research code base to test bitstream features. AV1 (the format) was designed to be used for a variety of use cases including real-time and interactive streaming and it is possible to create a non-libaom based encoder that does so (see the https://github.com/xiph/rav1e project).

And still, for some companies the bandwidth savings of AV1 are worth deploying today even with the longer encode times of libaom. For example, you can try AV1 streams on YouTube right now:

https://www.youtube.com/testtube

[gajjanag]

So here is a possibly naive question.

From my viewing of Youtube, Google transcodes uploaded videos (typically H.264 stuff) to VP9 only when a certain view threshold is reached, which makes sense from their perspective.

However, I have also noticed that due to the chain of encodes source -> H.264 -> VP9 (latter two available to Google), the VP9 stream is often of noticeably lower quality. Thus, whenever I can, I use an H.264 stream.

This problem will not go away with AV1. In fact, from an archival/local usage standpoint, as others have noted here, AV1 is pretty much impractical due to heavy encoding time increases that will unlikely go away with SIMD as compared to x265 or x264.

As such, from an end user experience point of view, what does AV1 offer that H.265/H.264 do not already?

[ZeroGravitas]

YouTube encodes are always done from the source. When new codecs like AV1 are introduced they reencode from the originally uploaded source not from other YouTube encodes.

The immediate benefit of AV1 will be felt by people with decent machines but terrible bandwidth as the higher compression will give them higher quality. There's talks given by YouTube employees about this process when VP9 initially rolled out and how different parts of the globe benefitted depending on their tech and infrastructure levels.

[vbezhenar]

Youtube will transcode your H.264 anyway, AFAIK there's no way to prevent that. Hopefully it also saves original file, so VP9 won't be of worse quality.

[ec109685]

As others have said, it is for encode once, decode many scenarios. Same quality, less bandwidth and cpu time spent decoding.

[iuysdgsdi7fgi]

20% less disk space usage compared to H265