Good:
- AV1 has a palette predictor designed to improve on pixel art by storing individual pixels as indexes into a palette.
- Chroma from luma helps preserve exact colors in pixel art, assuming color is lonely related to brightness (won't work as well for color-only changes, possibly not when brightness and color vary separately, or multiple colors and brightness are mixed)
Bad:
- AV1 takes seconds to minutes per frame. I let my laptop chug for half to several hours, running Manjaro AUR with bleeding-edge ffmpeg-git, encoding multicore tiled AV1, and it managed to encode under 3 seconds of video. (Did it link to an older libaom-av1 or is it bundled statically with ffmpeg?)
- When chroma subsampling and CfL (chroma from luma) mix, the brightness is subsampled to create a color prediction, instead of being used to add extra color resolution.
- Youtube's sample AV1 encodes have 4:2:0 subsampling (aka color channels have halved width and height resolution).
Rav1e may be faster, but apparently disabling chroma subsampling breaks CfL and inter-frames.