Any chance of having libaom2 soon, AV1 is impractical without it.

I suggest you report a bug. If the bug and security fixes are significant then the package will be updated sooner rather than later

Ubuntu is not a rolling release distribution and packages can be left in favour of ones with issues

You have to be aware that Ubuntu is copying packages from Debian, and also Debian has only version 1.0.*
There is already a bug report in Debian, https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=972467
If you create a bug report for Ubuntu, please add a reference to the Debian bug.

Yes, I realise that Ubuntu is re-synced with Debian at the start of each cycle... but I don't know much about Debian's release cycle. Also, I did look at installing the relevant packages built for debian, but there's a number of dependencies that would really unravel even 21.04, since things like gstreamer and by association "ubuntu desktop" are in that dependency tree...

Still, without knowing Debian's release cycle I don't know if it's something that can make it in before 22.04 LTS, and I think it's pretty important for anyone looking at using AV1.

I didn't initially want to log a bug, because it's really not so much a bug, and as you say the answer is probably "we have to wait for debian"... but I was definitely hoping to highlight the fact that this is a fairly important update, at least for those using it.... mainly through ffmpeg I would assume.

I mean, I could build you a version of libaom in a PPA, but for performance reasons, you're better off building your own copy locally to take full advantage of your CPU. AV1 encoding is demanding and makes good use of assembly code, so this is one of those cases where it makes sense to optimize Gentoo-style. This should build you a good local copy of aomenc (v3) in /usr/local

sudo apt-get build-essential yasm cmake git
mkdir source
cd source
git clone https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom
cd aom/build
cmake ../
make
sudo make install

You would need to rebuild other programs (ffmpeg/gstreamer) to use it, though.

Yes, I have built a local copy of libaom2.0.2, possibly update to 2.1.0 soon, but recompiling ffmpeg proved to be pretty challenging for some reason, and I dread to think about gstreamer... as it is I'm using aomenc, included with libaom... it does mean I have to pipe it through a y4m raw video step... but I have a working flow. Just would be nice to know if this is something that we're likely to see in 22.04, or if I should double down on finding out why building ffmpeg is an issue.