To my eyes and preference, both x265 and AV1's stills are far less blocky and far too smoothed than I'd like, but then again I've been an unabashed proponent of

To my eyes and preference, both x265 and AV1's stills are far less blocky and far too smoothed than I'd like, but then again I've been an unabashed proponent of less smoothing [1], having lived through early H.264 encoders' blurry messes. Once I get past that, some of the test images look better on AV1, and some look better on x265. Some of them kill detail here, some of them kill detail there. I think this is a victory -- both of them perform really well, considering, and allocating a bit more bits to get it looking nice is always an option. It's good to have a royalty-free codec that's actually good, and with much more profile and fanfare than just a weird garage-band secret project like VP9 was. And with widespread hardware support, it may actually make a dent in JPEG's marketshare. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20fake%20sharpness&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20fake%20sharpness&sor...