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Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

that sounds great, but this is a press release with no real technical details. can anyone in the know add some context? for instance, whats the tradeoff? I assume more CPU?

webrtc based video chats are all still using h264, did they not adopt 265 yet for technical or licensing reasons? what is the likelihood of broad browser support for h266 anytime soon?

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H.265/HEVC takes about ten times as much computation to encode than H.264 [1], so H.264 still has legitimate technical use cases, even with licensing/patents aside.

This makes it great for a company like Netflix or YouTube, but less good for one-to-one and/or battery sensitive use cases like video calls. However, specialized chips help, and some mobile devices can record in HEVC in real time (mine from 2019 can). I believe current smartphones have HEVC encoding hardware, but I'm struggling to find a source for that right now.

I haven't seen the details of this new codec yet, but it's quite possible it also has a large encoding cost which will make it better suited to particular use cases, as opposed to a blanket upgrade.

[1] http://www.praim.com/en/news/advanced-protocols-h264-vs-h265...

iPhone 7 onwards[1], Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 onwards[2], and Intel Skylake and later CPUs[3] can all encode and decode H.265 in hardware to varying profile levels.

1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT207022

2: https://www.qualcomm.com/snapdragon/processors/comparison

3: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Hardware/QuickSync

QuickSync is actually a feature of Intel's integrated GPU. Parts without GPUs, no matter how recent, don't have QuickSync.

> webrtc based video chats are all still using h264, did they not adopt 265 yet for technical or licensing reasons?

Is that with x265 built into both browsers ? I build it into mine but I don't think it is the default for ffmpeg.

Not sure why this was downvoted. These all seem like very reasonable questions that others here might be able to answer.

WebRTC aims to adopt AV1. H.### codecs are a dead end.

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