How much more effective is this than HEVC/x265 (especially at 4K HDR) resolutions?
MSU's comparison: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-New...
x265 complained about the recent MSU test: http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented-msus-2017-c...
But equally x265 likes to refer to MSU comparisons when the results make x265 look good: http://www.x265.org/
An x265 post referencing another paper which says HEVC outperforms AV1. The post insinuates AV1 might not be royalty-free. Reads like an attempt to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt: http://www.x265.org/excited-av1-closing-doors/
But indeed it's a little bit ironic for someone advocating for HEVC to be concerned about patent royalties and licensing.
x264 or x265 was basically never tuned for PSNR or SSIM what ever metrics. Basically the 30-40% AV1 claimed to be better in those value. And in that case, the x265 developer isn't wrong, it is very much the picture, not the values that matters.
VMAF should hopefully bring much more useful numbers. But we will have to see and put some time in since it is very new.
At transloadit we’ve been testing the reference implementation but to encode a video it’s about 20x slower than h264 still :) there will be many improvements to speed up but it’s expected to remain a lot slower (up to 4x as slow) or so I’ve read.
In markdown that would put the 4 in italics, where it's not supposed it still works as emphasis, but can be a bit confusing.
People like it because it has better licensing.
That is definitely going to change when real optimized encoders are written, especially since all the major CPU/GPU manufacturers are part of the Alliance for Open Media.