> I recently started self-hosting my family's photos and videos
No offense, but HEVC vs AV1 is not in any way consequential to this trivial scenario. Those photos and videos will be decodable and re-encodable for you _forever_. Don't think you need to store all that stuff in some half-baked encoding just because it's theoretically free-er.
But they're referring to _current_ pains with HEVC and HEIF, and the pains are directly related to the non-free nature; most software (especially web browsers) doesn't support HEVC and HEIF due to their non-freeness, which means the server has to transcode the files on the fly, which decreases quality, requires lots of CPU resources, and might not even be possible to do in real time if the files are big enough.
> Those photos and videos will be decodable... forever.
It will be possible forever, but not easy. JPEG is built into the standard library of every scripting language, and viewers come with every OS. I'm just lazy, that's all. I've tried "better" formats, but my life is easier when I stick with JPEG, MP4 (even though it's non-free), MP3, FLAC, etc.
Just yesterday I came across an old backup I made of some CDs 20 years ago... in Monkey's Audio. The files were 2% smaller, but they also reached out from the past and annoyed the hell out of me. haha
No offense, but HEVC vs AV1 is not in any way consequential to this trivial scenario. Those photos and videos will be decodable and re-encodable for you _forever_. Don't think you need to store all that stuff in some half-baked encoding just because it's theoretically free-er.