AV1 is not simply ready. The specification is finished, but the encoder-decoder is not yet optimized. (It's considered experimental by ffmpeg for example. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1 )

There's development happening here: https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+log/refs/heads/master/...

> The specification is finished

Maybe not. There are still normative (i.e. changes affecting the spec) cases in the bug tracker:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/aomedia/issues/list?q=label:Hotl...

In one of the tests rav1e encoded 1080p source at 0.013fps (i5-7600K @5GHz). That's half a year for a 2 hour movie.

Private torrent communities are already reluctant to use x265 which provides marginal gains compared to x264 at a great increase in encoding time.

A part of the process in pirate movie encoding (p2p, not really scene) is testing optimal encoder parameters (adaptive quantization strength, psychovisual rate-distortion, quantizer curve compression etc) on short clips meant to be representative of the whole movie (e.g. 60 frames every 4000 frames). If encoding a single test clip takes an hour as with x265 that sure puts a damper on things.

About the only place in movie torrent communities where x265 makes sense is 4K encodes as x265 can retain HDR metadata (h264 can too to an extent with the 2017 revision to T-REC H264 but it's hardly supported anywhere).

This may be different for pirate _streaming_ services.

> In one of the tests rav1e encoded 1080p source at 0.013fps (i5-7600K @5GHz). That's half a year for a 2 hour movie

This is easily explained by 1) no hardware acceleration, and 2) the reference implementation is currently intended for clarity and ease of changing, not efficiency or speed. After the bitstream solidifies, both problems will be solved.

> Private torrent communities are already reluctant to use x265 which provides marginal gains compared to x264 at a great increase in encoding time

Because there would be a clear quality loss. The websites they're ripping from (amazon, netflix, whatever) are using H.264, and to recode into H.265 would lose significant quality.

>Because there would be a clear quality loss. The websites they're ripping from (amazon, netflix, whatever) are using H.264, and to recode into H.265 would lose significant quality.

This is wrong for two reasons: the source codec doesn't matter (it gets decoded to raw yuv420 first anyway), and netflix/amazon/UHD BluRays already use HEVC for 4K which I alluded to earlier.

Netflix and Amazon also already encode in HEVC, they stream it to compatible players/hardware