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Obligatory "patents are terrible and should not exist". But given that they exist, that H.265 is known to be extremely patent encumbered, and there are alterna
by mort96 3y ago
Obligatory "patents are terrible and should not exist".
But given that they exist, that H.265 is known to be extremely patent encumbered, and there are alternatives (AV1) which are believed to be unencumbered, why do companies repeatedly choose to put themselves at risk by choosing H.265?
- tuetuopay 3y agoH.265 predates AV1 by a good margin. Also, when they switched, there were not really any efficient AV1 decoders (there is dav1d now in software), and they are still quite rare in hardware today. The power of H.265 came from existing decoders and the quick adoption of hardware decoders, which are important for phones and smart TVs. And your walmart craptop. I'd also bet they calculated the savings of H.265 for bandwidth and storage outweighed the cost of the lawsuit. Now they "just" gotta shell up for a license and call it a day. Or switch to AV1.
- acdha 3y agoAV1 is finally happening but you’re still talking about millions of devices which can’t handle it. A rough figure is 90% vs. 75% but that also doesn’t account for software playback or less efficient hardware implementations causing worse battery life. A couple years from now, I bet it’ll be more of a default choice. https://caniuse.com/hevc https://caniuse.com/hevc https://caniuse.com/av1 https://caniuse.com/av1
- mort96 3y agoThe 90% vs 75% figures ignore the fact that the 75% AV1 support is made up of 72% full support + 3% partial support, while the 90% H.265 support is made up of 21% full support + 69% partial support, so AV1 is doing surprisingly good! But yeah, that's fair. I overlooked how much older H.265 is than AV1.