What I Learned About Deploying AV1 from Two Deployers
11 comments
·December 16, 2025null
cmbernard333
I have been converting my H265 (HVEC) collection to AV1. I am still trying to find the exact parameters for FFMPEG to produce the optimal output for the devices I use plex on. Its been a little bit of whack a mole so far, but it seems ideal for file size when I get it right.
npodbielski
What is the difference in size of files? Around?
loufe
I've been transcoding my media collection leaving my PC on overnight over months, it's great. My biggest issue is client support for native playback of AV1, naturally.
For what it's worth, AB-AV1 [1] is a pretty awesome tool written in rust which compares random samples from a file at different parameters based on their VMAF score [2] (algorithm from Netflix for human-perceived visual likeness), choosing optimal parameters to save as much space as possible with the loss you're willing to stomach, on a file-by-file basis.
Small plug: I made a nice little python GUI wrapper for ab-av1 [3].
[1] - https://github.com/alexheretic/ab-av1 [2] - https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf [3] - https://github.com/Loufe/AB-AV1-GUI
dragontamer
Because of conversion losses, I have to imagine this is subtly very bad.
Every form of lossy compression deleted data. Yes AV1 is more efficient but only when working off of high quality originals.
H265 already deleted a ton of data. It can never recover the quality loss. Compressing even further can only worsen the image.
arnaudsm
What's the optimal strategy then ? 50 GB Blu-ray remux => 3 GB AV1 ?
stefan_
Well its sure gonna get the filesize down though, great HECV -> AV1 transcoding success..
comrade1234
Do you know what plex clients can handle av1 without the server having to transcode?
I started looking into converting stuff to AV1 but only confirmed that my gpu doesn't support AV1 but does support hevc so I stopped there...
blueside
I started to convert a lot of my content in AV1 until I realized that my Nvidia Shield devices won't play AV1. My $30 firestick will play them but I do really prefer the Shield. I guess I'll wait it out and hope for a new Shield (it's been 2019 since Nvidia released one) but i'm not going to hold my breath.
loufe
IIUC, it's more about the client hardware that determines ability to play without transcoding. You'd have to check the mix of devices you have connecting to it and make a judgement call.
I wonder what the video editing story is like.
It would be cool if one day (if not already today?) you could use AV1 as a drop-in replacement for h264 for recording with OBS, smoothly editing without proxy clips and rendering out highly disk size efficient videos that look good.
DaVinci Resolve's free version on Linux does not support h264 but apparently does support AV1. Kdenlive supports both. AV1 sounds like it would be a great solution for Linux if the above is possible.