h265 is doomed because of the multiple patent pools that have formed and the extreme price hikes compared to h264. It's a risky technology to build on. That's the best ad that AV1 can have, and many members joined the alliance for open media for that reason after it became clear that the patent pool situation wouldn't resolve.
As for your browser support question, yes, Safari has traditionally been anti-ogg, but a few years ago Apple joined the alliance for open media and added opus support to their browsers (although only in the caf container, for some weird unexplainable reason).
Open codecs have won in the lossless audio domain (flac). There is no reason they can't win in the lossy video and lossy audio domains too (not sure about lossless videos but FFV1 seems to have lots of support by archivists who want open technology).
I strongly recommend to see this video:
"The state of advanced codecs; separating hype from reality" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgE8-4rcXl0
If your world of Video = Every Video usage on the planet Earth. Then HEVC isn't doing so bad, every shipping TV has had HEVC decode, most ( if not all ) Smartphone, PC, Tablet has hardware Decoder shipped.
Sure, but it was massively pushed as the successor of h264 as the new de facto video codec standard, after almost a decade in use it has clearly failed in that respect.
IMO this codec generation saw no winner, instead h264 remains the undisputed king, the next battle for the crown will likely be between AV2 (or whatever it ends up being called) and VVC (Versatile Video Coding).
Yes. And I think there is something more than licensing. x264 managed to push H.264 way beyond what anyone could imagine. It wasn't until 2017/2018 did x265 or in fact any commercial H.265 encoder had clear advantage over x264 at 8 / 10Mbps+ bitrate. For HEVC 4K it was obvious, but 4K content never really took off, and h.264 for 1080P was good enough at those bitrate.
I dont know much about AV2, but VVC is looking very promising. I just hope they dont mess this up.
Sure, because it is "good enough" for what it does. But recently, with the advent and demand of 2k and 4k videos, people realised the need of, and have started appreciating the capabilities of HEVC.
When it comes to the popularity of video encoders, my unscientific way of judging it is to look at what the pirates are using. If you look at the torrent scene, most of the popular tv series and movies are now also available HEVC encoded and they are popular too (especially the high quality 2k and 4k Blu Ray rips). It's rare to come across any VP9 videos, and HEVC is undoubtedly number 2.
Personally, even I've started re-encoding my video library with HEVC, once I discovered that the "medium" setting takes about the same time as H.264 encoding and gives an acceptable quality for (sometimes) half the file size.
I do keep an eye on encoders, and while it is good to know the work going on this field, practically speaking nearly everyone is moving on to HEVC. Nearly all the other competitors are in development and unusable because of their really slow encoding time.
Be careful when saying the truth!
Note that I am in no way an advocate for HEVC (even if I sound like one :). I am just speaking from a practical point of view, as a user. If tomorrow there comes another encoder that takes less time to encode, and offers better compression, I'll immediately dump H.264 and H.265 for it.
After the HEVC licensing debacle, the industry isn't going to jump on a bandwagon with unlimited unknown downside again, not when royalty-free alternatives like AV1 exist.
Am I the only one who is not reading this sentence correctly. It seems to suggest patent unencumbered codec have won for the past 15 years.
Regardless of that, AVIF is not patent unencumbered, it is just royalty free.
Not sure where you're getting that idea that open codecs have won.
Cable, broadcast TV, live streaming, web conferencing, personal videos, blogging etc. Most of those will be using H.264/5.
10 years ago only the hard core capital F Free Software people used them or even considered them
MPEG-LA is indeed well connected to lobbying parties and Hollywood, which established HEVC as the codec for 4K Blu-ray discs. (I personally don't remember the last time I borrowed an optical disc to watch a movie. I actually don't even own any type of optical disc driver anymore!). However, VP9 dominates over HEVC in streamed media.