Alright, pull up a chair. We need to talk about AV1. The codec wars are a special kind of hell. For anyone who’s ever worked in video engineering, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a multi-decade, billion-dollar street fight over bytes and pixels, waged in the esoteric battlegrounds of DCT blocks and entropy coding. We argue endlessly about H.264’s ubiquity, HEVC’s licensing nightmare, and the mythical potential of the “next big thing.” For years, we’ve been promised a streaming messiah. A c...