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Comment by hsbauauvhabzb | Hacker News Reader

Why do pirates prefer hevc over AV1? I assume they don’t care about intellectual property so I assume it comes down to technical quality of the algorithms?

Maybe they have moved to av1 and I just don’t know it. Either way the quality of the piracy scene has always seemed vastly better than legitimate channels, up until Netflix.

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HEVC encoding is far more mature. Encoders are faster, of better quality, and hardware acceleration exists. Additionally, for video playback outside of a PC, HEVC support is ubiquitous, AV1 support is virtually unknown.

And -- universality of the playback. "Why don't people adopt Vorbis?" almost answers itself, "Where/on what devices are they going to play it?" Without looking -- does your Apple TV support X?

For the record, it seems like more and more devices are supporting Opus for general use cases. It seems to be the audio codec end game - at 16kbps it sounds as good to me as 64kbps mp3

> For the record, it seems like more and more devices are supporting Opus for general use cases

Yes, exactly and AFAIK it's because Chrome/Google/YouTube has recently supported Opus to the exclusion of these proprietary formats for higher quality (read HEVC level) video.

At least with web streams, pirates don't re-encode.

And since web streams are in h.264 and h.265, that's what the torrents are in too. It's not about preference, it's about the source.

(And the web streams are in h.264 and h.265 because that's what people have the most hardware decoders for, which preserves CPU usage and battery life.)

That applies for TV show. For movies though, the vast majority of new torrents are Blurays re-encoded to HEVC (x265 being the encoder used pretty much every time).

UHD Blu rays are also HEVC.

well yes, but not everyone wants to download 70GB movies, so blu-ray movies are often re-encoded for smaller filesizes (10-20GB 4K HEVC, 5-10GB 1080p H264 AC3 sound, 1-5GB 1080p HEVC AAC)

Most people don't have AV1 decoders. So not very surprising that pirates too would choose to use HEVC.

Some discussion on this question 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19362098

Thanks, I like reading this stuff. But that link was 3.5 years ago

It comes down to the fact that HEVC is supported by more devices. 1080p and lower resolution versions of pirated movies still come in H264, because that is supported by even more devices...

This is it. Lots of poeple use stuff like Plex, on devices that will handle QHD HEVC but not QHD AV1. Not to speak of every other device...

I don't get how IP factors in here. As a non-pirate just distributing my cooking tutorial, I don't have to pay when I encode in HEVC.

encode is/was slow. Theres at least one group that was running an encode farm for AV1 though. today, theres a TON more AV1 content available these days from pirates as better hardware is available, and ffmpeg is usable with AV1 now.

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