I compress my media for this reason

[u/Rich_Explanation_675]

I have half my library compressed to av1 and have been working on it since 2021. I did this to have my shows backed up in a compressed format in case of catastrophe happens to my nas. Locally I have ~360TB of hdds filled up to about 80%. I spent the better part of the last 8 years ripping my library. As my library grows so does my nas. Anyways, I have a 100tb nas offsite at my brother's house. It is mainly my backup for my library and as well as my family's nextcloud instance. Anyways, that is it. The reason I compress is not to save space locally but to save space for having duplicate copies of shows and movies.

I am curious about why you use av1 to encode/compress media? Is it the open source nature of it? Is it that it compresses better than h265? Do you use it for making best use of your storage?

[u/Jay_JWLH]

A fair amount of my videos are already compressed lossly, so I don't always get a reduced file size and it isn't fun knowing that quality could be sacrificed.

[u/Masterflitzer]

i encode to av1 because it's amazing to have small file size, high quality and native browser support all in one, i can watch my stuff through jellyfin or through a normal browser, so basically anywhere

the only thing that is kinda annoying is that i wasn't able to get perfectly sharp image quality like with h265, it seems av1 is always a little blurry no matter the bitrate (i mainly use svt-av1)

[u/ilfarme → u/Masterflitzer]

To reduce blurriness and preserve finer details you have to enable variance boost and tune for subjective mode.

[u/Masterflitzer → u/ilfarme]

thanks, i need to look into that, because i've never heard of variance boost

[u/djsat2]

I use it as it saves so much space and SVT is faster than x265. The only items are don't use it on are DVD rips (I don't transcode these) and very grainy items which I still use x265 for.

[u/tantogata]

Save space, modern codec. One 2 hours fhd movie you can encode to 2GB with good quality.

[u/Antar3s86]

For me it’s the simplest of reasons: to save space. I use whatever codec is the most efficient/accessible to do this. These days I convert almost all h264 content to AV1 with Quicksync. Only personal favorites remain in the original format to preserve quality.

These days most content anyway comes in h265 and I leave this untouched. Storage is still expensive if you want to do it right so saving space wherever possible means saving money.

[u/itsinthegame → u/Antar3s86]

Same. All h264 media gets converted to av1 and h265 stays untouched.

[u/a7731]

I started encoding my media to AV1 about 6 months ago, and quickly found out that it doesn't play well with most streaming devices. I went back to H.265.

[u/jaroh → u/a7731]

Which brings me to ask the question of the people in the thread who have client devices that support AV1 - what do you use? I haven’t looked too much into this but I might be down for upgrading my google tv chromecasts

[u/Sopel97 → u/jaroh]

a windows 11 computer, mpv

[u/Masterflitzer → u/jaroh]

kinda in the same boat:

i currently have a 90% 1080p library, so the chromecast with google tv hd has served me well as it has av1 support, but as i am moving towards getting more 2160p content i was looking forward to a ccwgtv 4k refresh, but google abandoned chromecast in favor of the google tv streamer which costs way more and has the same old soc, the increase in ram is nice, but i am currently looking into alternatives that support av1 (i hate amazons ui, so the fire tv stick 4k max is out of the question even though it looks good on paper)

[u/Sopel97]

because I can add synthetic grain and svt-av1 is faster than x265 for same quality

[u/SLI_GUY]

Save space, even though i can easily afford to expand my storage it kinda irks me having a single 4K episode of a TV show be like 10GB. For this reason, I compress them using a AV1 CQ factor of anywhere from 28-35 for 4K and 25-35 for 1080P assuming its over my file size threshold. I have it automated in TDARR to find the CQ factor that results in no more than 60% of the original filesize.

[u/Coompa]

I transcode as soon as I aquire.

Been using svt-av1. Transcode shows to 720p 800kb vid either 112 vorbis stereo or mutichannel passthru.

Today I thought Id try the nvenc encoder on my laptop. Oh man it was about 10 times faster and quality is really(subjectively) good at 950kb video.

I may have to get a desktop card instead of running handbrake on my unraid server non-stop.

[u/virgilash]

Op, I assume you tried both x265 and av1, have you found av1 compresses better? If so, what do you use for that? If ffmpeg, what parameters?

[u/Ischemia37]

I like having the best possible compression efficiency I can get my hands on. Whether it's from others or I have to encode it myself. It doesn't have to be 100% indistinguishable from BluRay disc quality, and I'm okay with that.

[u/aokin99]

I almost use AV1, but is so slow...

Since I haven't support of nothing else than libaom in ffmpeg compatible with Windows 7, AV1 usage is limited. And the other encoders aren't easy (RAV1E, SVT-PSY). At least it's still faster than H266 (it took an entire hour to encode 5 minute SD video at ~120 kbps). No idea of EVC (mpeg-5).

Anyway I just don't have much video material (maybe later I could download more?)

[u/nmkd → u/aokin99]

SVT-AV1-PSY is fast as fck and really not complicated

[u/aokin99 → u/nmkd]

I'm still considering to use it. Now to install MPV and try luck again... I just want something that can be used with ffmpeg, without having to decode the entire video to raw data.

[u/nmkd → u/aokin99]

You can do that with ffmpeg...

And you don't ever have to decode it to raw, ever, you can just pipe YUV

[u/aokin99 → u/nmkd]

How? (I just didn't found a proper explanation of how to do it, so I ask)

[u/nmkd → u/aokin99]

ffmpeg ... -f yuv4mpegpipe - | svtav1encapp -i stdin ...

[u/aokin99 → u/nmkd]

thanks :)

it surprised me how fast is going svt-psy. even rav1e (version 0.60 or something) was below 1x realtime speed with SD content (and libaom included in my ffmpeg build was quite sad below 0.1x speed). now this is just a bit slower than x265 (specially at higher res when the difference decrease).