I am COMPLETELY aware of the difference and I was deliberate in writing that. We need the kind of love, hard and excellent work on AV1 software (encoder is the harder, being open ended) that brought us the x264 encoder. AV1 decoders will come aplenty I have no doubt and I'm hoping for a good FPGA implementation.

That was entirely the point of the comment that you replied to correct.

>We're probably not going to see AV1 implementations on the same level as x264 for at least a few years.

True, on that note, over at the Doom9 forums, the x265 spokesperson there said that they will consider making a AV1 encoder should there be a market.

Given the massive amount of support gathered for AV1 from web and hardware giants, and how it's a royalty free codec and thus in a great position to be the next generation 'de facto' video standard on the web, I'd wager there is a good market for a third party encoder from excellent developers like those behind x265.

It's correct that av1 based on vp9? So vp9 codecs exists and can be used as start for av1 implementation?

The base was VP10 + tools from Thor (Cisco) and Daala (Xiph.Org/Mozilla), and it evolved from there to AV1 through a process of "experiments", test, IP checks and then its enablement.

Assuming that VP10 shares a significant base design with VP9 it would not be surprising if some part of VP9 sillicons decoders could be leveraged on customer hardware, while awaiting for more dedicated circuits.

But on the software end, libaom (AOM reference implementation) is indeed a fork of libvpx. But this library is not broadly considered a good implementation, even for VP9. Pehaps the guys behind EVE for VP9 [1] will produce an AV1 implementation based of their codebase.

[1] https://www.twoorioles.com/eve-for-vp9/

Hopefully fast implementations won't be proprietary like EVE is.