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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> Safari ties support to a hardware decoder, which I suppose is understandable to avoid accidental battery drain from using a software codec

I still have a pretty deep dislike for Google for turning on AV1 for everyone in Chromium. It’s the ultimate “fuck you, I care more about my bottom line than your user experience”.

Edit: and clown HN rears its head again. I guess cutting users their battery life to a third is worth it as long as Google saves a little bandwidth?

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Doesn't the Media Capabilities API [1] provide a way to determine if a codec is "power efficient" (presumably meaning hardware supported)? So then you can switch to another codec if AV1 isn't hardware-supported.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Media_Capab...

That might be, but on (most?) Chromium browsers you have to install h264ify to force-disable AV1/VP9 on devices that have no AV1 hardware decode.

What is even more annoying is that you can only do a full disable. You can’t disable AC1/VP9 video decode but leave image decode intact.

What I'm saying is in an ideal world web content should be able to detect whether some codecs are not hardware-accelerated, and so such workarounds should not be necessary. Of course, lots of naive web content might just check if it's supported and use it anyway... but surely the big sites like YouTube get this right?

Software decode has its uses - if you just want a small GIF-style looping clip, hardware support doesn't matter much, and it's nice to have one codec that can be relied upon to work everywhere.

google is far more interested in not paying royalties than your battery life on youtube

Thanks for shouting out h264ify. I run older hardware and have been (mostly passively / randomly) trying to figure out how to use less resources.

A lot of older hardware isn’t _too much slower_ than today’s with the exception of these codecs wasting system resources.

>Edit: and clown HN rears its head again. I guess cutting users their battery life to a third is worth it as long as Google saves a little bandwidth?

Why do you think so much in browsing has been offloaded to users via JS?

Stop using Google software and services if they annoy you so much. Vote with your browsing habits.

Ah yes, let me switch to the YouTube competitor that every channel is multi-loading their content to.

Nobody forces you to watch video content. It's your choice.

This is a daft argument and you know it.

Meaning "you're right but I don't like it". :)

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