Last two generations of nvidia or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVENC

Intel Arc, AMD Radeon 7000 series, Pixel 8, GeForce 40, and a few others.

See "Encoding" column in table:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware_encoding_and_deco...

Lots of people are using AV1. They just don't know it.

Encoder are extremely slow.

I implemented an encoding pipeline for AV1 for vids uploaded to my social news site (think reddit competitor except I'm extremely small fry). I eventually removed the code for it.

While the space savings and quality improvements are good, the encoding speed is an order of magnitude slower than using h264/vp9. In the end the user experience of causing people to wait significantly longer for an AV1 encode wasn't worth the tradeoff. To fix the user experience problem, I still had to encode a h264 version anyway, which kinda defeats the point when it comes to space savings. You still get data transfer improvements, but the break even point for when the encoding costs offset the data transfer costs were around 1000 views per min of video encoded, and as an average I'm far below that.

IMO there's a reason why YouTube only encodes AV1 for certain videos - I suspect it's based off of a view count. Past that point they trigger a AV1 encode, but it isn't worth it to do all videos, at least right now.

Worth keeping in mind I was looking at this ~2 years ago, so things may have evolved since then.

I do. I watch scifi shows over the internet with my friends. We watch it together on a web page with an html5 video element served out of my apartment. I've had to re-encode it to 3 megabits per second (to avoid stutter/buffering) with no b-frames. When initially setting it up, I tested both H264 and AV1 at that bitrate and H264 looked considerably worse. No surprise there, considering H264 is old enough to drink (22 years) whereas AV1 is only 7 years old.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think I can at least sort of understand why they're going with this speed of release cadence. If the release cadence is too slow, you might end up with another JPEG situation where the new codec is undeniably better in every way, but nobody wants to implement it since the old standard was around for so long without any competition.