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Comment by dopa42365 | Hacker News Reader

New Edge supports it, if you have the h265 extension from the microsoft store (cmd "start ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq"). It's also the only (?) browser that supports AC-3 audio. Thanks for nothing, Dolby.

There's barely any content though (possibly premium VODs on Netflix etc).

Bilibili (kinda like Chinese youtube) offers HEVC (and AV1) playback, if your browser supports it. Example: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Q44y1372Q

In general it's kind of a moot point by now, just go with AV1.

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My problem with AV1 is that hardware support for it is far from ubiquitous. I can load up a file I encoded with x265 on any of my devices from the last 6 years and be sure that it will play back smoothly without eating battery. The only device in my house with hardware AV1 support is the RTX 3080 in my desktop. So for the time being, I encode all my blu-ray rips with x265.

My GTX980 did not support HEVC decoding in hardware, and as a result it played like crap on my system. The Nvidia cards have only supported it since the GTX 10 series. That isn't very old IMHO.

The GTX980 was introduced in 2014. It's plenty old.

The 900 series came out nearly 8 years ago. Back then the world was worried about Ebola and Russia was annexing Crimea.

Imagine worrying about pandemics and Ukraine now...

The GTX10 series is pretty old as far as computer hardware goes. Hardly anyone runs anything older, even in third world countries: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Software decoding should also work on a $100 cpu.

Pascal GPUs came out 6 years ago. Intel has also included hardware decoders on their CPUs with integrated graphics since 2015.

It is perfectly reasonable for hardware this old or older to still be in use. But by virtue of being standard in pretty much all new hardware for 6-7 years now, HEVC support is far more ubiquitous in 2022 than AV1.

More importantly, I cannot feasibly bring my RTX 3080 with me on a plane. When loading up movies before I travel, I need them in a codec supported by my phone or tablet. HEVC has fit that bill for years now, and will continue to do so until AV1 support has become ubiquitous in mobile hardware and my current devices have been retired.

> In general it's kind of a moot point by now, just go with AV1.

You don't always get to decide. E.g. IP cameras will generally support both h.264 and h.265 these days, with HEVC doing vastly better than AVC, yet if that output has to go near a browser, instead of through dedicated software... SOL. Can't do anything with it. The hardware can, the software can't.

And AV1 is decode-only anyway, and only supported in the newest platforms. CPU decoding is just not a reasonable solution.

It's not just browsers. One popular Windows-based video surveillance platform has hardware decode support for H264, but it's software only for H265; that's on both Windows clients and Android mobile. That means your H264 cameras show up instantly but H265 takes a few seconds per stream, and too many of them on one screen means you're skipping frames. At least two companies I installed these for decided to double their storage instead of taking the perceived UI performance hit.

Are you sure it's "not just browsers"? With the current popularity of embedded browser engines, there's a good chance that these clients are actually browsers in disguise, or at least that they embed a browser for the frame which shows the camera streams.

It's odd that the browser supports AC-3 but the MS video player does not unless you pay for the codec, while all the other video players include it.

Going with AV1 is not an option for the vast majority of people as it requires hardware support. If you try using AV1 on a computer that didn't come with a hardware decoder for it, your machine will crawl.

I force h264 in YouTube for this reason instead of using VP9.

> If you try using AV1 on a computer that didn't come with a hardware decoder for it, your machine will crawl.

My computer doesn't have a hardware decoder for AV1 (as shown by "vainfo"), yet AV1 videos play perfectly fine on it, both within the browser (including on Youtube) and outside it. Playing the AV1 demo (https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/) on the browser at its maximum resolution uses only around half of the CPU.

You can easily watch 4k AV1 videos on any recent 6+ cores CPU.

So, not an issue unless you're using hardware from 2015 or so? In which case you're unlikely watching a ton of 4k+ content anyway.

I'm still using a Broadwell CPU. 2 cores. It works perfectly fine. I don't use the computer for gaming and do try whenever possible to do so to use h.264 which is fully hardware accelerated.

The machine does not feel slow to me. I have a fast SSD in it and lots of RAM so it is actually quite responsive. It just can't handle certain things like AV1.

I'm not sure if this is the case. Current Edge Dev (102.0.1245.3) reports "No" for HEVC, even with the extension installed. Old Edge based on EdgeHTML/Spartan would indeed play HEVC content

Drop some local h265 mp4s into your edge browser, works fine for me with the extension.

I don't know what to tell you, it doesn't work with the Video tag which is what matters

> In general it's kind of a moot point by now, just go with AV1.

Safari doesn't support AV1 though. I'll stick with AVC until it does

Remember: those h264 artifacts aren't real, they can't hurt you!

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