libaom-av1's weakness at this time is that it tends to blur low-contrast details sooner than x265, budgeting bits instead towards better motion (via smaller partitions, better sub-pel) and less ringing artefacts. When comparing low-bitrate AV1 to x265, my observation is that x265 tends to suffer more than AV1 when it comes to preservation of details and artefacts around the edges of high and low motion areas. I've done 10 minute presentations that worked out to <3MB. If you're doing screencasts, I have found that -crf 40 is acceptable for 1080p a lot of the time for low-motion, and this is up to 4x faster than x265 for the same quality and the same final file size. If you're only playing off local storage and/or creating these copies for archival purposes then this is the way to go. This gives less predictable file sizes and may cause streaming issues. If you want even better speed, do single pass with -crf only.

Old Android media players may struggle without the use of tiles though, as they had about 1/3 the single-thread performance of the Apple products of their day. In my experience even 6-year-old iPads can play 1080p AV1/Opus files fine with VLC and stream the result seamlessly to AppleTV. That maximises cache locality and avoids the minor bitrate increase caused by the use of tiles. If you have a lot of files to encode, drop the -tiles option, set row-mt to 0, and run one copy of ffmpeg per core. $ ffmpeg -hide_banner -y -i '$INPUT' -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 22 -b:v 1600K -metadata title='$TITLE' -metadata:s:v:0 title='$ABOUT' -metadata:s:a:0 title='$ABOUT' -strict experimental -row-mt 1 -tiles 2x2 -cpu-used 4 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a libopus -ac 2 -b:a 160K -passlogfile '$INPUT' -pass 2 '$OUTPUT'However this isn't the best speed/quality you can get if you're encoding an entire library of files. $ ffmpeg -hide_banner -y -i '$INPUT' -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 22 -b:v 1600K -strict experimental -row-mt 1 -tiles 2x2 -cpu-used 8 -pix_fmt yuv420p -na -passlogfile '$INPUT' -pass 1 '$OUTPUT' Code: $ INPUT='input.ext' OUTPUT='output.ext' TITLE='Title text' ABOUT='about text'

Av1 ffmpeg