Typical end users do not. Companies do because it will save them money.
Enthusiasts will care because it could save them storage space for equivalent quality, though if the cost of encoding is so high then just in terms of energy costs you may save money just going for a cheaper codec and upgrading storage with the saved money.








Yeah as a result of this post I decided to look into AV1 grain synthesis again. That’s the only way I can see that AV1 can meaningfully “improve” over h265 right now for noisy content like movies, which is what enthusiasts care about.
Grain synthesis is where you analyze noise on the original file, denoise the video stream and reapply artificial noise of a similar style as the original at decode time.
It relies on a lot of assumptions:
From a short experiment, I found that VLC was able to render the synthetic grain, but MPV(.net) did not out of the box. I had to play around with gpu rendering modes to get it to work.
As for transcoding, it’s unclear what happens to the synthetic grain, whether it is burnt in or simply ignored. At least one or two people have reported it will just be ignored and you’ll get a weirdly smooth movie.