It’s downvoted because this comment appears in literally every discussion about new codecs, is misguided and trivially countered every time, and yet it persists. People enjoyed this discussion the first, second, and maybe even third time. By the twentieth time, people get tired of commenters making these kinds of baseless assertions that fundamentally boil down to an accusation of staggering incompetence on those involved in designing the codec.

Yes, the reference implementation of encoding is slow. Being fast is not a high priority for a reference implementation. Optimized implementations will come later. ASIC implementations will come later. The H.265 reference implementation was similarly slow, and it’s not a problem. And mobile devices primarily care about decode performance.

> The H.265 reference implementation was similarly slow,

Please provide evidence. Because all other data has shown it to be 100x slower.

There is a reason why people are obsessing over encode speed.

>> The H.265 reference implementation was similarly slow,

> Please provide evidence. Because all other data has shown it to be 100x slower.

I got this!

H.265/MPEG-HEVC is the latest video coding standard... it's well known that reference implementation of HEVC codec, HM, acts an important role during standardization... However, HM is far from a practical codec because of very slow coding speed even on modern multi-core computers.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7041782/ (Dec. 2014)

Encode speed hasn't seen much optimization, the bitstream was frozen just weeks ago.

Also there are already an alternative AV1 encoder in the works, RAV1E, written by Mozilla in Rust, so there will be competition which will likely speed development, and the x265 developers have stated that they will create an AV1 encoder if that's where the market goes, which at this point seems very likely given that all the major players are backing this codec, coupled with the fact that it's royalty free and thus can be implemented anywhere.

Slower compared to what?

The x265 encoder clocked at 0.1-1fps in 2014 on a 16-core Xeon E5-2660: http://www.apsipa.org/proceedings_2014/Data/paper/1359.pdf

Today you can achieve >200fps with CUDA-based encoders.

Google and Apple are both on the AOM and will be implementing decode as well as encode support on their hardware.

Not sure why this issue keeps getting brought up. It's baseless and completely untrue.