Nowadays its pretty common, but not everyone has relatively recent devices.
It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
Youtube made it mandatory to have AV1 decoding in TVs/STBs for new devices since 2? 3? years, so it should become more common. (but embedded SoCs not meant for TV are still way behind.)
> Mali being the biggest.
FWIW, on the vast majority of devices (well, all that I'm aware of), Mali isn't responsible for hardware video decoding.
I think you mean Google, and they made it mandatory for Android. Most of those old devices don't use the latest Android version. And YouTube still happily delivers up VP9 to older versions as recently as two months ago.
> FWIW, on the vast majority of devices (well, all that I'm aware of), Mali isn't responsible for hardware video decoding.
If you're talking about LG, Samsung and Sony; yeah they have their own image processing hardware. That only applies if you're using the TV's app and not a settop device.
To clarify, I'm not claiming there are no AV1 devices or that it's particularly rare. Just stating that it's not ubiquitous enough to be made universal without a large segment of the populace/devices being affected.
I mean Youtube. Mentioning Youtube requirement is more relevant than Android's requirement since many more TVs and STBs ship with Youtube than just Android, and is older than Android's.
> If you're talking about LG, Samsung and Sony; yeah they have their own image processing hardware.
I'm not. Amlogic, Rockchip, Allwinner, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, Unisoc, Google Tensor, Realtek. None of those SoC vendor use Mali for hardware video decoding.
Wikipedia [0] list a lot of SoCs using Mali GPU, but doesn't list a single one using Mali video decoder. Looks like they abandoned it since they haven't announced any new version since 2019.
Roughly; Intel since Tiger Lake (2020); not that it makes much difference.
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.
Depends; Mediateks and Rockchips do support it; finally also Qualcomm (with AV1 being mandatory in Android 14).
I agree, it will take some time (years), until people replace their devices and AV1 will be universally available.
But it is available in devices sold today, which was the point.
> "AV1 hardware decoding is still pretty rare"
It is not. It comes with new devices.
The issue is, that it will take some time for replacement to be widespread enough, so that Netflix could switch wholesale. But do they have to switch everything, at once? They could switch by targeting the capable devices: AV1, where possible, AVC elsewhere.
They probably have such targeting already, but not they will have to disable the HEVC profiles for Germany (or EU).
No, you have to do best within the limits that Apple imposes, whether technical, business, legal, whatever.
If other platforms do not have these limits, there's no point in ignoring the additional capabilities and artificially limiting your product. If Apple wants them on their platform too, they are free to lift these limits.
Users don't care about the distinction, they will blame you for issues in your app, no matter if caused by Apple, app developers, or even phone providers.
For example, I don't see any Apple users blaming anyone for not providing native browser engines by respective browsers on iOS. Or not being able to purchase Kindle books in-app. Or similar, Apple-induced limitations.
I never said it wasn't. I pointed out the main difficulty in going 100% AV1. Not that no one would be able to watch AV1 videos:
> It's still fairly uncommon on ARM, MIPS, etc GPUs being used in low-cost cores for TVs and set top boxes. Mali being the biggest.