Don't think of a codec as just a magic black box that takes in frames and spits out compressed frames. A codec is more like a toolbox or instruction set. It gi

Don't think of a codec as just a magic black box that takes in frames and spits out compressed frames. A codec is more like a toolbox or instruction set. It gives you a bunch of options you can use in order to compress a frame. Unless AV1 removed some of the tools from the earlier codecs it drew from (e.g. VP9), it's entirely possible to write an encoder with similar performance characteristics as the earlier codecs. What I'm getting at here is that AV1 isn't inherently computationally complex. Its reputation for being computationally complex comes from people looking at the reference encoder early on during development and treating that as the final product. The reality is that it shouldn't be too far from HEVC in terms of computational complexity.