0.99 SSIM H.264 vs AV1 | general

I took the 73 Mbps 4K NLUUG Tears of Steel encode, scaled it to 720p, and used CRF 10 veryslow x264 to simulate 720p BD.
SSIM cheating was disabled in AV1 with tune 0 and variance boost, 720p was chosen to handicap AV1's 128x128 superblocks.
Even when nearly maxing out x264 compression , preset 4 AV1 = ~30% better compression and encodes ~40% faster as well.
I confidently declare that H.264 is now official boomer trash like flickering CRT displays.

ffmpeg -i tearsofsteel_4k.mov ^
-vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:black" ^
-c:v libx264 -preset veryslow -crf 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p input.mp4

base_av1=ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 28 -preset 4 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -svtav1-params
psy_av1=keyint=5s:lookahead=120:tune=0:enable-variance-boost=1:variance-boost-strength=3:variance-octile=4

frame=17616 fps= 18 Lsize=  212825KiB
bitrate=2375.4kbits/s speed=0.73x elapsed=0:16:45.14

base_h264=ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset veryslow -pix_fmt yuv420p

frame=17616 fps= 13 Lsize=  304524KiB
bitrate=3399.0kbits/s speed=0.535x elapsed=0:22:51.14

https://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/graphics/blender/demo/movies/ToS/tearsofsteel_4k.mov

0.99 SSIM is special because it's correlated with a CRF ~20 x264 encode, both objectively and subjectively rated as very high quality.
When AV1 was initially released it was only good for low to medium quality video encodes and not recommended for personal encodes.
To make things worse, AV1 uses tricks to cheat in SSIM but Tune 0 and variance boost unnoficially disable SSIM cheating.

>>650
>I confidently declare that H.264 is now official boomer trash like flickering CRT displays.
When do you think we will see mass adoption? It's like H.264 refuses to die

>>652
I'm betting it's going to be this year. One of the main downsides to AV1 used to be that it took longer to encode vs H.264. Most people probably still think this is true. As for decoding probably like 90% of existing computers/laptops can now decode 1080p AV1 just fine.

Getting the word out to normalfags is going to be an uphill battle though.

>>653
Storage prices is gonna play a big part as well. Storage used to be mega cheap so it didn't matter that much, but now we need more efficient encode for smaller file sizes

ffmpeg -i tearsofsteel_4k.mov ^
-vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:black" ^
-c:v libx264 -preset veryslow -crf 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p input.mp4

base_av1=ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 28 -preset 4 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -svtav1-params
psy_av1=keyint=5s:lookahead=120:tune=0:enable-variance-boost=1:variance-boost-strength=3:variance-octile=4

frame=17616 fps= 18 Lsize=  212825KiB
bitrate=2375.4kbits/s speed=0.73x elapsed=0:16:45.14

base_h264=ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset veryslow -pix_fmt yuv420p

frame=17616 fps= 13 Lsize=  304524KiB
bitrate=3399.0kbits/s speed=0.535x elapsed=0:22:51.14

https://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/graphics/blender/demo/movies/ToS/tearsofsteel_4k.mov

>>650
>I confidently declare that H.264 is now official boomer trash like flickering CRT displays.
When do you think we will see mass adoption? It's like H.264 refuses to die

>>653
Storage prices is gonna play a big part as well. Storage used to be mega cheap so it didn't matter that much, but now we need more efficient encode for smaller file sizes