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Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

Ideally we all simply stop using HEVC.

Why? It's the successor to h264. The link in the OP is a hardware entitlement, since GPUs/CPUs now have h265 hardware encoder/decoders, so you already legally purchased rights when you bought a compatible device.

I prefer having a newer codec with superior quality/size. The only reason you wouldn't use HEVC is if your hardware lacks support, the $0.99 version is for the ability to use the codec in software. It's illegal to use it without licensing, but like most things, hard to enforce. Mostly for company compliance.

It's just anti-user. Use the AV1 codec, some hardware supports it.

AV1 is an open standard and and can also be included in open source software. It has the same capabilities as HEVC, but without the patent bs. AV1 decoders/encoders are also already being included by hardware, like in the new Intel ARC cards.

HEVC has been supported by mobile phone hardware for years now, both encoding and decoding. And the difference with AV1 is negligible.

Newer phones support AV1 decoding at least.

Personally I'd much rather use an open standard, and the fact it's better than HEVC doesn't hurt either.

Qualcomm chips still don't support. This is a serious blocker. Side note: Qualcomm is one of the patent holder of HEVC

But now coming soon in new Qualcomm chips:

https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/entertainment/av1-open-...

A slightly on-topic question... I have an AMD GPU that supposedly supports AV1 decoding but wouldn't work in VLC which I usually use. I googled and apparently VLC doesn't support AV1 hardware decoding.

Anyone know how I can play AV1 using hardware decoding?

Firefox and Chrome will use hardware AV1 decoding on Windows when it's available.

I used the Movies and Tv app on Windows 11 on a Nvidia GPU supporting AV1 decoding and it played it without any issues.

> The only reason you wouldn't use HEVC is if your hardware lacks support

No, the main problem with HEVC is that it is not licensed under royalty-free terms. In contrast, almost all commonly used internet formats and protocols are licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone is free to use and implement them without paying a licensing fee. Video has been an anomaly.

Imagine if HTML wasn't licensed under royalty-free terms. Or TCP/IP or HTTP or SMTP or any other internet format or protocol that you (probably) use every day. There's no reason why video needs to be a special case here.

Fortunately, video formats like AV1 (https://aomedia.org/) and audio formats like Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) exist for high quality, royalty-free video and audio coding.

These formats are deployed in the real world right now. YouTube, for example, makes extensive use of both. If you have a browser which supports AV1 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, but not Safari yet), you can see if a YouTube video is playing back in AV1 by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Stats for Nerds".

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