2024 Midyear Update with AV1 Encoding Plan - HMV Mania

An AV1 re-conversion effort is in progress.

Recap from previous update

On May 22nd, we posted an update about a new encoding format being used for video releases going forward — AV1.

This has many benefits:
– Lower bandwidth usage
– Less space used on the server, and less space used for local downloads
– Higher retained quality, with original framerate preserved

A Note on Compatibility with Mobile Devices

We saw an increase in mobile users stating they saw “source not found” on AV1 videos, and every instance was an iPhone user that did not have an iPhone 15 Pro. We put up a notice on the front page about this as it’s a frequently mentioned topic.

Given Google Analytics Data since May 2nd up to now, we’ve seen Android users are significantly higher in number than iPhone users. Android phones have overall better support of playing AV1 videos out of the box than iPhones.
– Android visits, Chrome: 143,375
– iOS visits, Safari: 31,920

It is recommended in this situation to use VLC media player. More specifically for iPhone users, you want the iOS VLC download page. Every video post has information under the video: this includes length, release date, etc. on the right you will see an icon that looks like an arrow pointing down onto a hard drive. You want to hold where the text says “DL” next to that icon, and copy the URL from it (e.g. on Android it says “Copy link address”). Then you paste this mp4 URL into VLC media player through an input stream.

AV1 videos are supported on most modern browsers on desktop. Safari has mixed results. See caniuse for more information.

AV1 Re-encoding Effort

As of this writing, the site has 3,210 published videos.

Over the course of the past month, we have replaced 1,210 videos with AV1 re-encodes of the source videos. It is important to re-iterate that the AV1 videos were encoded from the source files, not the 24 FPS 3 MB/s bitrate H264 re-encodes. Roughly 1,800 videos still remain, although over time we’ll be updating them.

Server Lifespan

The previous forecast was that we’d have enough space until reaching the “safe max” on the current server until late August/early September 2024. Given the current AV1 reconversion effort, the 1,210 videos replaced have allowed the overall average video size to go down for an idea of how long the current server can last given current trends.

Now we’re looking at May 2025 with the average release rate of 4 videos per day, and this is before even more improvements that can be made with the AV1 re-encoding effort.

Forums

Some of you that have visited EroScripts may know about the recent ban they have on certain categories of fictional content.

The on-site forums are expected to have more activity over time with the introduction of the Funscripts section.

We are in the process of creating accounts for Funscript creators.

Genres

Genres do technically exist on the site, although are low in priority given that we do not have a reliable way to tag videos as of now.

Examples:
– idol
– maid
– petite
– succubus

If anyone can recommend a practical path forward to work towards tagging the over 3,000 videos on the site, we can revisit this topic. Note that it must be a reliable method of doing so and needs to scale across thousands of videos.