MediaCurator VS Av1an

Docs code on GitHub and PyPi

The hardware encoders are very fast and generally better than x264 (but not by as much as you'd think with the x264 slow preset).

In addition, there are threaded AV1 encoders you may be overlooking, like SVT-AV1. For non-realtime, my favorite is av1an, which also yields better quality than is possible from aomenc: https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an

I specifically used https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an with --target-quality 100 to keep the compression as close to lossless as possible (you could probably shave even more size off if you didn’t use near-lossless compression)

There's also Av1an as suggested by someone else. It's going to produce more efficient encodes because it uses chunk-based encoding to reach the required VMAF for every single chunk, but this is also slower because every chunk will be re-encoded until the VMAF target is reached. It's also a PITA to compile, has a long list of bugs, and isn't very actively developed. One of the long-standing issues is that frames have a tendency to go missing during splitting, which IME is going to keep happening when the input files aren't standardized. And thus the recommendation is to transcode the input to lossless first, which is just completely unsustainable.

i'm still trying to figure out if av1an is the breakthrough to using large CPU counts without losing quality. but it's a ridiculously poorly documented program. i haven't gotten it to run effectively yet. https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an

I don't know about VVC, but I've never seen a recommendation of preset 0 for SVT-AV1. The docs say "presets 1-3 represent extremely high efficiency, for use when encode time is not important and quality/size of the resulting video file is critical". It seems like 0 is the equivalent placebo preset. But if you want AV1 with coding efficiency over all else, IIRC the typical approach is to use av1an to detect scene transitions and farm out parallel encodes with aomenc.

That might be because it doesn't work.

Have you seen Av1an? It's supposed to encode to a target VMAF.

Are you using the current version, 0.4.0, from https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an/releases