Thanks for your encodes. Here are some suggestions. For file naming, a format of season and episode as S02E05 or S2E05 is easier to parse, search for, and display. Including CRC32 in file names is sometimes useful. It can be used to search for files or check them. The RHash tool can put the CRC in the name automatically. AniDB includes CRC32 of files. It no longer makes much sense to encode higher resolution video to 720PYUV420 screen format. What makes more sense is: When scaling down, cease chroma subsampling: encode to YUV444. Either scale down the luma to match the chroma (540PYUV444) or scale an axis to a dimension evenly divisible by 128, the maximum AV1 partition size.

Stop it with your 444 nonsense, it breaks hardware compatibility! It changes **nothing** in a mini format, the only reason you saw that in old fansubs' 720p encodes is because they targeted a much higher quality than every AV1 720p releases out there. You will not convince anyone except the already-converted wavpack shill, who is already targeting "high quality" encodes anyway.

NekoTrix's idea of a contribution is commenting "Hmm FBI" on the page of good torrents. The YUV420 encoding format is itself nonsense for modern hardware. It was a hack to reduce bandwidth for TV broadcast by discarding chroma information. Using YUV444 improves efficiency of the encoding and decoding because calculations are done at the full resolution. If you use YUV420 when decoding then it scales up the chroma dimensions, does the decoding calculations, then scales down again. Encoding, decoding, and scaling 540PYUV444 takes less computation power than 720PYUV420 and 540P has higher resolution chroma. (360 versus 540). By scaling to 540PYUV444 , you do not need to scale the 1080PYUV420 chroma layer. You can use it as-is. Example torrent https://nyaa.si/view/1623659 That one uses 12bits per pixel, which uses slightly more computation than 10.

Man, it was simply a joke on the content of that anime, no need to be offending. I never argued 420 isn't stuppid nowadays, because I would agree with you on that, but we are distributing releases, if people can't play the files, what's the point? It will only allienate. I think you are wildly underestimating how much people wouldn't bother if the files didn't play instantly on their TVs or default phone media player and they had to troubleshoot things. They will simply move on: there are well enough releases of almost anything, they'll get a bother free release like they are accustomed to. It is the exact same for 12bit. Losing hardware support for very little improvements is not worth it. To dare say that 444 decoding is less computationally intensive is an immense ironic joke to make when way more efficient hardware decoding was lost in the process. BTW sorry to burst your bubble of ScarletNeko shilling, but at their quality target and for such low resolution, x265 and heck even x264 would yield better results than this overly engineered AV1 encode. With so many odd choices in that release, choosing AV1, going 444, going 12bit, using wavpack, the technological circlejerking seems real. So much placebo in a single release. Don't get me wrong, the release is most likely just great, but very wrong in many ways too.

I've never encountered something which can not play YUV444. The dav1d library supports decoding. dav1d developers give acceleration for ARM processors (used in TVs and smartphones) priority over x86 (desktop computers). If it does not play fast enough yet, what is needed to get support is media to exist that people have trouble playing. If you don't make use of it, they are not going to put effort into supporting it better. If you think some devices will have a problem and want to see support, you can provide a link to a feature request which people who want support can boost to ensure it gets more support.

How many torrents are seeded by smartphones and TVs anyway? I bet not nearly so many as by desktop computers.

You get it wrong, it is not that people download using their smartphones or TVs but that they have automated means to do so (media servers, NAS,...) and then playback stuff on these devices using Plex, Jellyfin and the likes. And I mean, it's not because encoders will make use of these features in the niche market that is anime piracy that adoption will grow big enough for developers and hardware engineers to notice it and most importantly care.