Hacker News Reader

H.265 seems pretty mainstream by now. Older devices obviously don't support it in hardware, but pretty much all newer ones seem to, no?

It's just a slow percolation throughout the ecosystem as people buy new hardware and video servers selectively send the next-generation streams to those users.

The effort on h.265 has already been spent. Now it looks like h.266 is the next generation. It's going to be years before chips for it will be in devices. That's just how each new generation works.

H.266 will take many years to become a usable standard. H.265 is quite mainstream - even some cheap smartphones shoot it. Many modern DLSRs / mirrorless cameras shoot it.

H.265 seems to be gaining traction slower because many of the older devices, including laptops and some smart TVs don't support it. H.264 became ubiquitous for piracy since it offered tiny size and worked on older devices, making it the perfect choice for those in poorer countries where tech isn't the first priority in a household. I wonder if H.266 will run into the same problems as H.266.