It is definitely not worth converting x264, even less x265, to av1, if you are the only consumer. Just think about it. To get any "significant" space gains, while keeping a close to original quality (you will inevitably lose some detail), you need to spend maybe at least 3-4x more time encoding than the actual total video length, probably more, maybe 5x. Taking an average of 3GB/hour, 2TB is about 650 hours. x5 that's like 3250 hours. An 8 core ryzen will have like 150W total system load encoding av1. 3250h * 0.15 kWh =~ 500 kWh. 500 kWh * 0.15$/kWh (I took an optimistic electricity cost for these days, might be a lot more depending where you live) = $75 in electricity costs. Setting encodes, moving files around, will also take up some significant amount of time. You will gain maybe 1TB, if compressing audio to opus as well, less than that you will have significant video quality losses. 1TB of hdd space is worth $15 these days. And you don't waste time/electricity+money/video quality.

So it's only worth to get existing published encodes of the material you own, of if you are planning on publishing yourself. Or just for fun, if you want to experiment and encode one movie to see what's the best you can get out of av1.

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/ymrs5v/id_like_to_encode_my_entire_library_to_av1/

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[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Short answer yes. Much longer. More complex answer. Mostly. If you're planning on your devices being able to support hardware decoding and large resolutions/ high frame rates. Sit-top boxes and appliances are not quite there right now. I believe the newer Chromecast HD absolutely supports av1. But most of the older Chromecast including Chromecast TV do not support it directly. So it will have to be re-encoded to be streamed.

That said, the codec itself is fantastic. As an example for animated content, especially. I have some super high quality rips of the old old cartoon from the '80s of the Ghostbusters franchise. We're talking nearly a gigabyte encoded in h264 for a 22 minute episode. At SD resolution. Upscaling them to 720p and encoding them with av1. And a constant rate factor of about 40. They've been coming in between 80 and 200 MB in episode depending upon how much movement there is etc. The one thing with av1 is That as it degrades it sort of smooths everything which works out perfectly for animation most of the time. It can work for live action etc. As well. But you will encounter smoothing as detail is lost. But overall, it is much more preferable to the H style codex so far