The AV1 codec was finalized last summer, I'd wager we will need a couple of years before the encoders are able to show the capacity of AV1, including getting th

The AV1 codec was finalized last summer, I'd wager we will need a couple of years before the encoders are able to show the capacity of AV1, including getting the best out of encoding performance optimizations. As for the pirate scene, my impression is that outside of 'anime' they are very conservative and follow rigid specifications. And even in the 'anime scene', I'd estimate that ~90% of new releases are still h264 encodes. For some reason there was never a transition from h264 over to HEVC in the pirate scene, and I don't think this will happen for AV1 either. In my opinion, while AV1 improves on previous codecs, it's not a big enough technical improvement when taking into consideration the increased encoding time (perhaps further optimizations will help mitigate this). Instead, I think the big draw is the lack of royalties. But royalties is not a factor for the pirate scene, so for them I believe it boils down to quality/encoding time and hardware support, and here h264 still reigns supreme.