libaom is slow because it's fundamentally a research product - the folks hacking on it are mostly concerned with the workload of encoding a basket of twenty sho

libaom is slow because it's fundamentally a research product - the folks hacking on it are mostly concerned with the workload of encoding a basket of twenty short clips and demonstrating a tradeoff between Bjontegaard scores and increased encode time, and much less on holistically making a usable encoder. Source: wrote part of the AV2 spec and traded off a 0.3% improvement in compression for a 1% increase in encode time