libaom-av1 allows a minimum and maximum bitrate can be specified, instead of a quality target.
NOTE: When muxing into MP4, you may want to add -movflags +faststart to the output parameters if the intended use for the resulting file is streaming.
time ffmpeg -i a.mp4 -c:v libaom-av1 -minrate 500k -b:v 2000k -maxrate 2500k -f mp4 out.mp4
returns:
... real 107m58.989s user 618m30.322s sys 0m32.327s
NOTE:
NOTE: The bitrate limit by the -b:v where the bitrate MUST be non-zero.