Maybe I'm misunderstand this, but this smells fishy.
> However, Roku chose to use this as an opportunity to renegotiate a separate deal encompassing the YouTube main app
Those seem to be 2 different apps they're talking about
> Roku requested exceptions that would break the YouTube experience and limit our ability to update YouTube in order to fix issues or add new features. For example, by not supporting open-source video codecs, you wouldn’t be able to watch YouTube in 4K HDR or 8K even if you bought a Roku device that supports that resolution.
What Google says is: use our VP9 codec, or else.
Do they? Because if I put a 4K video through youtube-dl -F, I get this:
248 webm 1920x1080 1080p 1392k , webm_dash container, vp9@1392k, 24fps, video only, 193.77MiB
137 mp4 1920x1080 1080p 2650k , mp4_dash container, avc1.640028@2650k, 24fps, video only, 368.92MiB
271 webm 2560x1440 1440p 3453k , webm_dash container, vp9@3453k, 24fps, video only, 480.62MiB
313 webm 3840x2160 2160p 10434k , webm_dash container, vp9@10434k, 24fps, video only, 1.42GiBhttps://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en
> HTML5 streaming: Many browsers support HTML5 and either the H.264 video codec or WebM format.
As others pointed out, this could be about AV1. Which still is bull crap because YouTube hapily delivers video in H.* or VP9 when needed.
And it looks like the only reason Google stopped encoding in H.* to everyone's hand whether it's good or bad. This definitely has nothing to do with "opensource codecs".
Some Apple devices are (or used to be?) affected by this. For example, on Mac, Firefox or Chrome have been able to play 8K YouTube videos for a long time while Safari couldn't go past 1080p. This was "fixed" a few months ago, but only because Apple added VP9 support.
I don't think H.264 will disappear from YouTube anytime soon. They'll continue to use it as a fallback for devices that can't play VP9 or AV1 files. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if VP9 was dropped before H.264 when AV1 support (and YouTube's encoding capabilities) improve.
At the end of the day, Google/YouTube doesn't have to use a paid and proprietary codec like H.265 and Roku doesn't have to support VP9 or AV1 with hardware (or software) decoding. But since H.264 support is still there, the hardware should be able to play 1080p YouTube videos without a problem.
1: https://developer.roku.com/en-gb/docs/specs/media/streaming-...
However, consider:
- H.264 has been around siince 2003 (so, 18 years).
- VP9 was released in 2013 (so, 8 years). Google basically forced everyone to adopt the codec by refusing to encode 4k videos in anything else
- AV1 was released in 2018. Only 3 years ago. Yay, a new shiny toy for Google. And Google now tries to force everyone to switch to it, or else? Google's own Android gained support for it only last year.
So, when is Google going to drop VP9 for videos and only encode them in AV1? And should everyone drop it in another 5 years for an AV2?