Encoders for next-gen video standard are infamous for being slow. Some of that can be attributed to the immaturity of the software, but it is also the design that makes modern codecs slow for encoding. This talk will explore the inherent properties of next-gen video codecs and show what makes them slow. Beyond that, the talk will show, based on practical experiences from a codec developer, how those issues can be mitigated.

The talk will combine abstract high level analytics with practical experiences from the development of an optimized encoder for the recent Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. While based on a specific codec and implementation, the concepts generalize to a variety of modern standards, including AV1 and HEVC. Based on the specific example of motion field merge modes in VVC, it will be shown how they are both a blessing for compression efficiency and a curse for encoder search. The underlying reason being, the merge modes represent the toughest kind of search spaces – non-differentable enumerations. After answering the question posed in the title, it will be discussed how to retain most of the coding efficiency without waiting an eternity. Based on specific examples from VVC, the best kind of tools will be explored: those with implicit activation conditions and without signaling. This talk was presented at Demuxed ’23, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one.