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Comment by Const-me | Hacker News Reader

> will be released to the community under a GPL license' or similar

Both h264 and h265 have these implementations, I think FFMPEG library has both under the terms of GPLv2.

The decoders are almost completely useless. The video codec, at least the decoder, needs to be in the hardware, not in software.

Mobile devices just don’t have the resources to run the decoders on CPU. The code works on PC but consumes too much electricity and thermal budget. Even GPGPUs are not good enough for the job, couple generations ago AMD tried to use shader cores for video codecs, didn’t work well enough and they switched to dedicated silicon like the rest of them.

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> The decoders are almost completely useless.

You'd be surprised at how often these are used.

I wonder why?

Even Raspberry Pi has a hardware decoder: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo

Linux Kernel support for HEVC is WIP but I’m pretty sure they’ll integrate eventually.

buying vc1/mpeg licenses to use hardware decoding on raspberry pi's pre-4 was annoying https://codecs.raspberrypi.org/license-keys/

is this because of licensing/copyright?

Right, now I remember these keys.

But the very first Pi already had hardware h264 decoder (and even encoder!) which didn’t need any extra keys to work. No idea how they did it, maybe the license was included in the $25 price. Pi 1 was launched in 2013, at that time h264 has been already widespread, while mpeg-2 use was declining.

I think that’s why they did not include the license. It increases price for all users but only useful for very few of them, who connected a USB DVD or BluRay drives to their Pi-s.

Indeed. From an article here on HN there is a lack of vaapi support on Firefox and I think Chrome in linux. Furthermore there are special profiles(looking at you H264) that only work reliably in software decoders.

Mozilla added VA-API support under Wayland sessions in FireFox 76, and it'll be coming to Xorg sessions in FireFox 80.

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