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Another thing to consider, exactly the same thing happened when h.264 was first released.

Even though x264 quickly started seeing better results compared to DivX and XVid, you didn't see pirate encodes switch to x264 for years.

Yes and x264 is such an improvement that it was worth it. HW support became nearly universal. DivX and Xvid didn't have that.

So it was kind of a magical codec upgrade and now it seems more incremental to me.

The scene switched to x264 almost immediately. It did not take years.