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I agree AOM is the best quality now. But between Rav1e and SVT-AV1 it's not so clear for me. When you look metrics, SVT-AV1 is clearly the winner. But when I do side to side comparison ( e.g with online comparison tool like https://svt.github.io/vivict/ ) for me SVT-AV1 blur too much and don't have the same details retention than rav1e and I found rav1e much more pleasant ( my opinion) . I hope at some point there will be some real human a/b testing study.
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Perhaps things have improved for libaom since the last time I tried it but my issue wasn’t overall quality so much as sections of videos that had way too many very much visible artifacts (to me it looked like there were likely bugs rather than a poor design).
YouTube is using libaom for its many, many AV1 encodes. Without knowing the version you used or the settings you used there isn't much that can be usefully talked about. What we can say is that libaom is good enough to be used on the world's biggest video website.
I agree with the OP’s assessment - as recently as two weeks ago, Libaom was too slow to even do quality testing on real footage. And that’s with forty modern Xeon cores.
The fact that YouTube uses it only proves the increasingly obvious business model they use in the space, namely the monopolization of the encoding ecosystem by literally throwing away money to steer people clear of rav1e.
They're the real-production-use competitors to me, since it's a performance vs. quality trade-off game. libaom is slow! In reality I am going to use SVT or rav1e, so anything that helps me pick ...
