Get The Scene involved.

They shifted to h.264 successfully, but I haven't heard of any more conferences to move forward in over a decade.

Currently "The Last of US S02E06" only has one AV1 - https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=The+Last+of+Us+S02E06 same THMT - https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=The+Handmaids+Tale+S06... These are low quality at only ~600MB, not really early adopter sizes.

AV1 beats h.265 but not h.266 - https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202402.0869/v1 - People disagree with this paper on default settings

Things like getting hardware to The Scene for encoding might help, but I'm not sure of the bottleneck, it might be bureaucratic or educational or cultural.

[edit] "Common Side Effects S01E04" AV1 is the strongest torrent, that's cool - https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=Common+Side+Effects+S0...

At higher quality/bitrates, the difference is much smaller and device support is universal for AVC and quite good for HEVC. Anything over 1.5GB for a single episode would probably only be farily similarly sized with AV1.

There is one large exception, but I don't know the current scene well enough to know if it matters: sources that are grainy. I have some DVD and blurays with high grain content and AV1 can work wonders with those thanks to the in-loop grain filter and synthesis -- we are talking half the size for a high-quality encode. If I were to encode them for AVC at any reasonable bitrate, I would probably run a grain-removal filter which is very finicky if you don't want to end up with something that is overly blurry.

This may be in part because people that automatized their media servers are using hardware acceleration for transcoding (from 4k for example), and hardware has only recently added decoding for AV1.

In my case, I get both 4k (h265) and 1080p (h264) blurays and let the client select.

There are plenty of AV1 releases in other, better places than the scam bay.

Holy shadowban Batman! All of your comments are [dead]. What did you do to anger the HN Gods?

There was a conference?!