that's it that's the post.
JK, but seriously though. AV1 is incredible and I NEED support for hardware decoding to accelerate and fast. I just shoved an 18GB Blu-ray movie into 5 gigs with room for improvement. I can get stream worthy 1080p60 video at 6000kbps when I need at least double that if I use x264. Even at a ok encode speed, the 1080 6000kbps video on YouTube looks pretty good all things considered - sure my super high bitrate x264 video looks clearer, but it's also at least double the file size on my disk.
I could probably real-time CPU encode my streams with AV1. I could definitely do it even better with hardware encoding.
AV1 is black magic. It feels wrong.