Curious, Im pretty new to with encoding, but wouldnt going from 264->265 (lossy to lossy) cause further quality loss? I know you arent supposed to do that with audio, did it hurt your video quality at all?

Now with SVT-AV1, its debatably as fast or faster than HEVC

Exactly on both. Ever since i went Linux, I’ve found a suitable FOSS replacement for just about everything.

Microsoft can definitely get bent.