this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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AV1 only has gains at very low quality settings. For high quality, h265 is much better. At least with the codecs available in ffmpeg, from my tests.
Note that high-quality + low-bitrate AV1 setup often requires using parameters that rise the time and processing power beyond what's typically sensible in an average setup without hw encoder. And compared with h265 this would be even higher since not only is h265 less complex and faster to begin with, but it also is often hw accelerated.
Here there's a 2020 paper comparing various encoders for high quality on fullHD: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340351958_MSU_Video_Codec_Comparison_2019_part_IV_High-Quality_Encoding_aom_rav1e_SVT-AV1_SVT-HEVC_SVT-VP9_x264_x265_ENTERPRISE_VERSION
"First place in the quality competition goes to aom [AOMedia's AV1 encoder], second place goes to SVT-AV1, and third place to x265"
And av1 codecs are younger, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have improved over the h265 ones since the article.
Here's the settings they used in aom, for reference:
I can try it again, but what I did was compare h265 to SVT-AV1 in ffmpeg, using a couple different clips of different styles (including a video from my phone and some ripped blu-ray movies). I used “constant quality / variable bitrate settings, and ran each file with a variety of settings for both encoders. I judged the videos with a quality comparison tool ffmpeg has, and I also took subjective notes when I could tell the difference.
I found AV1 did better at very low quality (when it was firmly into the region where it was visibly different, AV1 did have better quality per bitrate).
But when trying to produce high-quality clips, AV1 was never able to produce a clip that matched the quality score of h265, even when the bitrate of the AV1 file was higher.