>IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.

But how can they do that without storing the original uploaded video until it hits that view count?

Do they actually store the original uploaded video somewhere, but reencode for the edge servers to save data/storage?

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