Yes. If you don’t have hardware that supports AV1 decode, it gets sent to the CPU instead.
For homelab stuff, the responsibility falls on the server to transcode the media to whichever format the client device requests.
That usually means being able to have ~2 simultaneous AV1 streams and maxing out the CPU.
To someone not knowing anything, how big a deal is the difference?
Super oversimplified, but take an imaginary 1GB video file and it will compress roughly to the size below with minimal visual degradation.
H.264 -> H.265 -> AV1
1GB -> 600MB -> 350MB
Thanks!
Is it (more) cpu expensive to decode the AV1?
Yes. If you don’t have hardware that supports AV1 decode, it gets sent to the CPU instead.
For homelab stuff, the responsibility falls on the server to transcode the media to whichever format the client device requests. That usually means being able to have ~2 simultaneous AV1 streams and maxing out the CPU.
With hardware decode, you could have 10+ streams.