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revelation·

It has taken off among pirates alright.

(There is a noticeable battery life penalty for h265 content though)

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I thought H265 was banned among most private trackers?

I know my private releases to friends are all H265, though they all use hardware that has native decoding (or is beefy enough to transcode from)

How common are native h265 decoders now? I've been curious when we would start to see stronger hardware support.

Most Samsung phones can do it. I know at least as early as the Note 4. HEVC is codec of choice for 360 video for the Gear environment due to its small file size. The Galaxy S7 can do 4K60 in HEVC. Although, VLC has a hard time playing these files on beefy PCs used to encode these files. My 4K/UHD LG SmartTV running WebOS from 2013/14 plays HEVC as well. The Netflix app handles their 4K streams with no problem.

There are just personal first hand knowledge examples.

All iPhones have it. FaceTime uses it, for example.

For non-mobile devices? (AFAIK)

Nvidia Geforce GPU's in the 900/1000 series can encode/decode it

Intel Skylake GPU's can encode/decode it

The Nvidia SHIELD TV can encode/decode it

Is there a scene standard yet? From a quick glance the content available is H264 reencoded to H265 at amusingly small filesizes.

H264 -> H264 -> H265 isn't going to look very god, no matter what you do (and depending on what your source is you could even have high bitrate MPEG2-TS at the start of that chain).

Battery life is poor because hardware deciding of hevc is not yet common. The GTX 10 series can do it but for most other devices it must be decoded in the CPU.

I think Kaby lake cpus should have decoding support as well

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