that’s it that’s the post.
JK, but seriously though. AV1 is incredible and I NEED support for hardware decoding to accelerate and fast. I just shoved an 18GB Blu-ray movie into 5 gigs with room for improvement. I can get stream worthy 1080p60 video at 6000kbps when I need at least double that if I use x264. Even at a ok encode speed, the 1080 6000kbps video on YouTube looks pretty good all things considered - sure my super high bitrate x264 video looks clearer, but it’s also at least double the file size on my disk.
I could probably real-time CPU encode my streams with AV1. I could definitely do it even better with hardware encoding.
AV1 is black magic. It feels wrong.
I, too, have only been using Handbrake because idk what else to use, so I’ve been limited to SVT-AV1 for encoding. I’d need to watch through stuff at length, but at speed 6 and quality 40 I personally don’t notice anything super off in my 1080p Blu-ray rip of The Last Wish (and got it down to an incredible 1.5GB). I definitely didn’t catch anything at speed 6 and quality 30 - it won’t be as small, and it’ll still take a while, but at that I personally saw like. no problems whatsoever.
Might need to watch out for any film grain though, idk how much that mucks with the process but there are settings to denoise and reapply on playback. I haven’t experimented with them too much because a) handbrake, and b) was trying to find good settings on a movie without grain to start.
I mostly saw problems when I used AOM-AV1 for encoding, at speed 7 and 6000kbps. That was purely because real-time encoding was why I needed that and it just wasn’t quite perfect for 1080p60 Splatoon clips, mostly also as a test for “if Twitch turned AV1 on tomorrow what could I get at their current limits.” SVT instantly got overloaded for real time at any real-time speed for some reason.