No offense, but HEVC vs AV1 is not in any way consequential to this trivial scenario. Those photos and videos will be decodable and re-encodable for you _forever_. Don't think you need to store all that stuff in some half-baked encoding just because it's theoretically free-er.
It will be possible forever, but not easy. JPEG is built into the standard library of every scripting language, and viewers come with every OS. I'm just lazy, that's all. I've tried "better" formats, but my life is easier when I stick with JPEG, MP4 (even though it's non-free), MP3, FLAC, etc.
Just yesterday I came across an old backup I made of some CDs 20 years ago... in Monkey's Audio. The files were 2% smaller, but they also reached out from the past and annoyed the hell out of me. haha
I agree that I would prefer to use a patent-unencumbered codec, but I'm not willing to use AV1 until it has common hardware decoding support. My battery life and power consumption is much more important to me than a theoretical, unlikely, future inability to decode it.
ffmpeg can be compiled with support for your hardware encoder.
Linux distributions and Firefox do provide H.264 support via openh264; it is sponsored by Cisco, who are already in the flat license territory, so all they have to do is track binary downloads (that's why they are separate download, or repository respectively). It also plugs seamlessly into linux multimedia framework (Gstreamer), so it is on the same level of integration, as Media Foundation codecs in Windows. There is no H.265 equivalent, still.
The hardware based encoding is not equivalent to software one; it is optimized for dumping compliant streams with low latency, it does not concern itself with effective use of the bits available. I.e. exactly what software based, offline encoders are good at.
[1] https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/hevc-video-extension... [2] https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/hevc-video-extension...
This isn't my experience with NVENC for h.264. Sure, software encoding can do somewhat (but not a lot) better (quality per bits), but at a fraction of the performance and using much more energy. For most cases were you're personally encoding video it's likely better to use a hardware encoder.
For H.264, hardware can brute-force every possible Intra encoded macroblock and make rate-distortion-optimised QP/prediction decisions in real-time or better. This gets much harder for H.265, where brute-force is fairly impractical and the clever algorithm wins.
A well-designed hardware codec can also run inter-frame block matching searches vastly more efficiently than software can.
Other techniques involve using copyright (the bitstream decode tables could be considered copyrightable for example).
Future techniques might even involve trying to use trademark law (for example, the first frame of any encoded video is the 'MPAA' logo in big bold letters, but without decoding that frame you can't decode the other frames). Trademarks don't expire.
At most that means you'd need to use old versions of software. An old publicly available file can't violate a patent issued 5 years later.
For the rest, Sega v. Accolade? And just putting a trademark inside the video wouldn't mean a decoder is using the trademark...
For last, say, 25 years I've seen many parties trying to hamper that, even in non-commercial setting (e.g. the original mp3 format encoder). If they don't, good!
These closed formats are typically patent protected, not kept secret through proprietary encoding/decoding software. As you probably know: (1) Those patents will eventually expire, (2) The price of a patent is immediate and complete disclosure of the technical method underpinning the claims.
Look at LED lighting, it's more energy efficient, so now we deploy more of it, ending up using exactly as much energy as before (but now everything is well lit).
The same with video codecs, as they get better, we generate more video.
Though with LED lighting, it really depends. I still am using far less power for all of my lighting vs 1 incandescent light bulb. I am thinking specifically of the room/desk lamp of my childhood. Though I haven't counted the blinkenlights on my router, switch, etc. Maybe all of those added up will tip the balance.
No way those total over a watt.
H.265 isn't interested in being royalty-free. But, luckily, AV1 is very interested in being royalty-free. So this time around we don't need to repeat the mistakes and compromises of the past.