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?
AV1 is really only practical for content that has a high quality source like a bluray release. Most streaming sites aren’t using AV1 yet, so anything from them would have to be transcoded. Transcoding a low bitrate source to another format will cause a loss in quality. It’s not really worth it unless you want really small files to watch on your phone.
AV1 hardware acceleration is becoming fairly common, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the streaming sites start switching to it soon.