JWasm VS rav1e

I should note, that OpenWatcom 2.0[1] is far better for supporting more recent C and C++ code, modern hosts and tooling, but still able to compile into 16 bit code. It is also actively maintained. Instead of MASM I recommend JWasm[2] + Jwlink[3]. Back in time I did a fork[4] of JWasm that has cleaner build system (CMake).

[1] https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

[2] https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/JWasm

[3] https://github.com/JWasm/JWlink

[4] https://github.com/JWasm/JWasm

You can give jwasm a try as it has full masm syntax support as far as I know.

Sure. You'll see it very often in codec implementations. From rav1e, a fast AV1 encoder mostly written in Rust: https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/tree/master/src/x86

Large portions of the algorithm have been translated into assembly for ARM and x86. Shaving even a couple percent off something like motion compensation search will add up to meaningful gains.

Or the current reference implementation of JPEG: https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/tree/main/sim...

Again, if anything AOM would be the one restricting licenses to AV1 (if they chose to) except AOM has stated and also published AV1 in a way to allow license free access to development (which allows people to make forks of the official build like it's open source) and usage. (1)(2) I don't see why they would suddenly change this.

You can speed up the sampling process with --vmaf n_subsample=5, which in my experience works more accurately than either 2 or 4, possibly due to this bug/feature present in multiple encoders. You might also need to manually set the number of threads used for VMAF calculation with --vmaf n_threads=16, but YMMV.

That remember me of https://github.com/xiph/rav1e which is an AV1 encoder

I put in the request for ffmpeg passthrough mastering-display data a few years ago and haven't heard of any support yet.

It's getting there.. Initial steps for FFmepg: https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/list/?series=8444 rav1e: https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/pull/3000

It's entirely possible to re-use bits of other HW encoders for the first pass (motion estimation, etc).