..Whilst the issues with so4.. are being sorted, there seems to be another challenge on the horizon:
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/royalty-free-av1-codec-turned-loose
VP9, x265, and HEVC are just in their infancy as to being fast enough for use in the wild.
And "when" this new codec will be fast enough to compress 30% additional, will probably around the time 8k UHDTV becomes feasible for consumers.
When x265 was released for beta just a few years ago, it took weeks to render a couple of hours of material.
I'd say, hold that thought for about 8-10 years.
given Murphy's law and being license free, not sure if we have to wait that long..?
I've been with this since the first software interframe codec for DVD..that was tmpgenc beta 12 in '02 or thereabouts.
Since then we've had AVC, and recently HEVC. So yeah, 8 years between major launches seems about right.
HVEC went from ratified to being in a huge amount of decoding hardware by the next year. including cpu's, phones, video cards, streaming devices etc. VP9 just as quickly made it's way into some hardware like intel cpu's, but for some reason didn't spread the way HVEC did. I know my chromecast ultra & galaxy 8 does vp9 HW decode but video card doesn't.