I looked into this before, and the short answer is that release groups would be allowed to release in AV1, but the market seems to prefer H264 and H265 because of compatibility and release speed. Encoding AV1 to an archival quality takes too long, reduces playback compatibility, and doesn't save that much space.

There also are no scene rules for AV1, only for H265 [1]

[1] https://scenerules.org/html/2020_X265.html

AV1 is the king of ultra-low bitrates, but as you go higher — and not even that much higher — HEVC becomes just as good, if not more. Publicly-available AV1 encoders (still) have a tendency to over-flatten anything that is low-contrast enough, while x265 is much better at preserving visual energy.

This problem is only just now starting to get solved in SVT-AV1 with the addition of community-created psychovisual optimizations... features that x264 had over 15 years ago!

I'm surprised it took so long for CRF to dethrone 2-pass. We used to use 2-pass primarily so that files could be made to fit on CDs.

> Encoding AV1 to an archival quality takes too long

With the SVT-AV1 encoder you can achieve better quality in less time versus the x265 encoder. You just have to use the right presets. See the encoding results section:

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...

Yeah I’m talking about web-dl though not a rip so there is no encoding necessary.