The real question is if it will come for #h264's undisputed (?) crown at high fidelity. Anecdotally it seems like h265 can only shave 20% bitrate from h264 before it starts looking worse for live action. h265 becomes more necessary in >1080p and HDR.

I've never seen high fidelity AV1 encodes. In the scene they just don't exist. I also barely see animation in AV1. (edit: I looked, and high fidelity anime AV1 exists. Live action, rarer.)

AV1 is incredible for low bitrate shitter encodes that still look pretty good. I see episodes of Breaking Bad that look 70% as good as h264 at 10% of the bitrate. Most of the time I see Netflix jank on my Netflix box, I assume (without verifying) it's AV1.

I also naively hope that encoding complexity will be dealt with. I think that ship has sailed, gone around the world, come back, sold its cargo, and sailed again. The investors in AV1 are megascale video corporations. At-home encoding has always been a niche of a niche. Now, even moreso.

Currently, archival-grade AV1 encoding of a feature film takes around 5 days on my high-end CPU. (Few years old now, but still a very good CPU.). An archival h264 encode might be 1/6 of 1 day.

AOM is also working on OAC, the successor to the #Opus audio codec. I'm surprised for a few reasons:

1. Didn't feel like there was any room to grow. AAC is transparent at 192k if not lower. Opus is great at 96k and hopefully transparent at some point (128k?).
2. Opus has been around over a decade yet still feels like it hasn't had its moment. It's used in the background a lot (even at Netflix and Spotify?) but I always hesitate to share Opus because it never seems to fucking work on e.g. Discord and iOS.
3. MP3 was tinkered with for decades and grew into LAME with VBR so a 20 year old codec was still fantastic.
4. Opus is the greatest name for an audio codec of all time.

But I suppose AI or traditional codecs will continue to improve, especially below 96k.

https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/oac
https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings